Amazon.com Inc. is pouring billions more into a rival to artificial intelligence leader OpenAI.
On Nov. 22, Anthropic PBC, an AI research company, and the Seattle internet titan said Amazon was doubling its investment in Anthropic, to $8 billion. The development follows up on a $4 billion commitment it made in September 2023. Amazon is a minority owner of Anthropic.
Anthropic, founded in 2021 by ex-employees of OpenAI, develops an AI model called Claude. On its website, the San Francisco-based company says its product is capable of advanced reasoning, vision analysis, code generation, and multilingual processing.
In a release, Amazon said the deal announced on Friday would extend an existing agreement, making Amazon Web Service (AWS) the primary cloud-computing provider for Anthropic. Furthermore, the agreement will make AWS Anthropic’s primary training partner, and the AI company will use AWS’s Trainium and Inferentia chips “to train and deploy its future foundation models.”
“We’ve been impressed by Anthropic’s pace of innovation and commitment to responsible development of generative AI, and we look forward to deepening our collaboration,” AWS CEO Matt Garman said in a release.
In its release, Anthropic said Claude is part of the core infrastructure used by “thousands of companies.” It cited examples of Amazon Bedrock being used by Pfizer Inc. to speed up drug research and development and Intuit Inc. to provide better customer service.
The multibillion-dollar deal highlights the fierce competition between leading technology companies to build and deploy generative AI. OpenAI kicked off the boom in 2022 when it launched its first iteration of ChatGPT.
In October, OpenAI announced it had raised $6.6 billion and was now valued at more than $157 billion.
OpenAI’s investors reportedly include Microsoft Corp. and Nvidia Corp. Nvidia, a semiconductor manufacturer, is a leading supplier of the chips used to power generative AI technologies.
The announcement said that Anthropic will work on hardware built by Annapurna Labs, an Israeli chipmaker owned by Amazon, and collaborate on the development of future technologies developed by Annapurna.
Along with Amazon, Anthropic’s investors include Google owner Alphabet Inc. Alphabet invested more than $500 million into the AI company.
