Amazon (AMZN, Financial) has announced a $4 billion investment in AI startup Anthropic, the developer behind the AI chatbot Claude and a competitor to OpenAI. This new funding boosts Amazon's total investment in Anthropic to $8 billion, though Amazon will maintain a minor shareholder position without a board seat. In March, Amazon made its largest external investment of $2.75 billion in Anthropic, following an initial $1.25 billion investment announced in September last year.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) will serve as Anthropic's primary cloud and training partner. Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips for training and deploying its AI models. AWS customers will have the unique advantage of using Claude to fine-tune their data.
Media reports suggest that Anthropic's announcement last month about its AI's capability to complete complex tasks like a human might be a reason for Amazon's increased investment. Jared Kaplan, Anthropic's chief scientist, mentioned that Amazon has been using these AI tools, with early customers and testers including Asana, Canva, and Notion. The company has been developing this AI tool since the beginning of the year.
In addition to Amazon, Google (GOOGL) committed $2 billion to Anthropic last year, acquiring a 10% stake and signing a major cloud computing agreement. Tech giants like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Microsoft (MSFT), and Meta (META) are fiercely competing in the AI sector, a market predicted to generate over $1 trillion in revenue over the next decade. Companies like Microsoft and Amazon are heavily investing in and internally developing generative AI technologies.
