Amazon has taken a major step forward in its AI strategy with a $2.75bn investment in Anthropic.
The move takes Amazon's total investment in the company to around $4bn as it seeks to be one of the world's leading forces in the increasingly-vital AI tools sector.
Amazon had previously poured $1.75bn into the company in September 2023, gaining a minority stake in Anthropic as a bonus, and has now exercised its option for further investment, clearly after seeing enough progress in that time to warrant further spending.
Amazon Anthropic deal
In a statement, the two companies noted that the work they are doing to try and bring generative AI technology to businesses around the globe "is only beginning".
The deal will see Anthropic use Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud provider, as well as using AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train, and deploy future models.
Anthropic has also pledged to provide AWS customers with access to future generations of its foundation models on Amazon Bedrock, opening up the most advanced AI features and tools for companies around the world.
Amazon had announced earlier this month that Anthropic's latest Claude 3 family of models, reportedly better performing than the likes of GPT-4, would be made available on Bedrock, highlighting the levels of co-operation between the two firms.
“We have a notable history with Anthropic, together helping organizations of all sizes around the world to deploy advanced generative artificial intelligence applications across their organizations,” said Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Data and AI at AWS.
“Anthropic’s visionary work with generative AI, most recently the introduction of its state-of-the art Claude 3 family of models, combined with Amazon’s best-in-class infrastructure like AWS Tranium and managed services like Amazon Bedrock further unlocks exciting opportunities for customers to quickly, securely, and responsibly innovate with generative AI."
"Generative AI is poised to be the most transformational technology of our time, and we believe our strategic collaboration with Anthropic will further improve our customers’ experiences, and look forward to what’s next.”
AWS and Anthropic had also teamed up earlier this year with Accenture, forming a partnership aimed at facilitating the responsible integration of custom AI models.
