The investment allows Amazon to strengthen its position in the rapidly growing AI industry. Anthropic, which has raised a total of $2.7 billion to date, will provide AWS customers with access to future generations of its foundation models and early access to unique features for model customization and fine-tuning. The startup also plans to use AWS's Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train, and deploy its future models.
Key takeaways:
- Amazon has agreed to invest up to $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic, initially investing $1.25 billion for a minority stake with an option to increase its investment.
- Anthropic plans to raise as much as $5 billion over the next two years and build a 'frontier model' that is 10 times more capable than today's most powerful AI.
- As part of the investment agreement, Anthropic will use Amazon’s cloud giant AWS as a primary cloud provider for mission-critical workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development.
- Anthropic has made a long-term commitment to provide AWS customers around the world with access to future generations of its foundation models via Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s fully managed service.