Amazon to invest $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic

The collaboration will position Amazon Web Services as Anthropic’s primary cloud provider for mission critical workloads

Amazon said it will invest $4 billion in artificial intelligence (AI) startup Anthropic, taking a minority stake in the company, which has been an AWS customer since 2021.

The collaboration will position AWS as Anthropic’s primary cloud provider for mission critical workloads including safety research and future foundation model development. Anthropic will also use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train and deploy future foundation models.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy believes that collaborating with Anthropic will allow customers get “even more value” from AWS Trainium, AWS’s AI training chip, as well as Amazon Bedrock, the company’s new managed service that lets companies use various foundation models to build generative AI applications.

“By significantly expanding our partnership, we can unlock new possibilities for organizations of all sizes, as they deploy Anthropic’s safe, state-of-the-art AI systems together with AWS’s leading cloud technology,” claimed Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic in a press release.

Anthropic has secured financial backing from several other tech giants including Google and Zoom Video Communications. And in August, Korean telco SK Telecom announced an additional investment of $100 million in the company, combining the telco’s expertise in telecommunications with Anthropic’s AI technology, including its AI model, which is called Claude. The telco had already made previous investments in Anthropic.

Ryu Young-sang, CEO of SK Telecom, said at the time: “By combining our Korean language-based LLM with Anthropic’s strong AI capabilities, we expect to create synergy and gain leadership in the AI ecosystem together with our global telco partners.”