E-commerce giant Amazon is reportedly in talks for a new multi-billion dollar investment in artificial intelligence startup Anthropic.
This would be Amazon's second investment in Anthropic, as the company previously announced a $4 billion investment in September last year. At that time, Amazon also revealed that its customers would get early access to Anthropic's technology, according to The Information.
In August, OpenAI co-founder John Schulman announced his departure from the Microsoft-backed firm to join the AI startup. "This choice stems from my desire to deepen my focus on AI alignment, and to start a new chapter of my career where I can return to hands-on technical work," Schulman said at the time.
Now, Amazon is pouring billions on Anthropic, which would give it a good edge in the AI industry. According to the report, Amazon has asked Anthropic to use a large number of servers powered by chips developed by the cloud computing major.
The AI startup uses Amazon's cloud services to train its AI model.
Just last year, the AI startup secured a $500 million investment from Alphabet, Google's parent company, which also pledged an additional $1.5 billion over time.
In a related move, Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world's largest cloud computing provider, has announced plans to invest 1.2 billion euros in Italy over the next five years to expand its data center operations in the country. This initiative aims to boost AWS's cloud offerings in Europe, following the launch of its first cloud region in Italy in 2020. The company plans to invest a total of 2 billion euros by 2029, according to Reuters.
The planned investment is expected to create up to 5,500 jobs up to 2029 across the AWS data center supply chain, including telecommunications, engineering, construction, and facility maintenance.
Also, AWS is making a major push to persuade the public sector to join the artificial intelligence revolution, as the generative AI race with Microsoft and Google heats up.
AWS and the other cloud giants say that the technology behind ChatGPT can have a huge impact on improving public services, including in health, security, charity, and NGO work.
