Anthropic said on Friday that longtime backer Amazon had pumped an additional $4 billion into the artificial intelligence startup, doubling its investment in the firm known for its GenAI Claude chatbot.
Amazon will retain its position as a minority investor and will be Anthropic’s main training partner for AI models, the startup said.
Amazon, which is Anthropic’s main cloud partner, is competing fiercely with Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google to provide AI-powered tools to its cloud customers.
E-commerce company Anthropic’s surge in investment underscores the billions of dollars poured into artificial intelligence startups over the past year, as investors seek to capitalize on a boom in AI-generating technology that became popular with the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022.
Microsoft-backed OpenAI last month raised $6.6 billion from investors, which could value the company at $157 billion and cement its position as one of the world’s most valuable private companies.
Anthropic plans to train and deploy its underlying models on Amazon’s Trainium and Inferentia chips.
Nvidia currently dominates the market for AI processors and counts Amazon among its long list of so-called hyperscale customers.
However, Amazon has been working to develop its own chips through its Annapurna Labs division, which Anthropic said it was “working closely” with to help develop the processors.
Britain’s competition regulator had said in September that Amazon’s partnership with Anthropic would not be referred for further investigation as it did not fall under its jurisdiction.
Anthropic, co-founded by former OpenAI executives and siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, said last year it had also secured a $500 million investment from Alphabet, which promised to invest another $1.5 billion over time .
The startup also uses Alphabet’s Google Cloud services as part of its operations.
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