Amazon invests $4B in AI start-up Anthropic, deepens technological collaboration
What's the story
Amazon has pumped in $4 billion into Anthropic, a top artificial intelligence (AI) start-up.
The investment comes as part of a wider deal that makes Amazon Web Services (AWS), the main platform for training Anthropic's advanced generative AI models.
Anthropic is also working with Annapurna Labs, AWS's chipmaking division, to build future generations of Trainium accelerators—custom-built chips specifically designed for training AI models.
Technological alliance
A partnership for next-gen AI
Anthropic's engineers are working closely with Annapurna's chip design team to squeeze as much computational efficiency as possible from the hardware.
The start-up intends to leverage this increased efficiency to train its most advanced AI models.
"Together with AWS, we're laying the technological foundation—from silicon to software—that will power the next generation of AI research and development," Anthropic said in a blog post.
Chip utilization
Amazon's custom chips to power Anthropic's AI models
Amazon has confirmed that Anthropic will use Trainium, including its latest version Trainium2, to train its forthcoming models.
The start-up will also use Inferentia, another chip developed by Amazon to accelerate model running, to deploy these models.
"By collaborating with Anthropic on the development of our custom Trainium chips, we'll keep pushing the boundaries of what customers can achieve with generative AI technologies," said AWS CEO Matt Garman.
Investment details
Amazon's total investment in Anthropic reaches $8B
With this latest funding, Amazon's total investment in Anthropic has gone up to $8 billion, all while remaining a minority investor.
To date, Anthropic has raised $13.7 billion in venture capital according to Crunchbase data.
The new investment is structured in the same way as the previous one but comes with a condition from Amazon, to use Amazon-developed silicon hosted on AWS for training its AI.
Model deployment
Anthropic gains traction through Amazon collaboration
Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei emphasized that the company's work with AWS has grown tremendously in the last year.
With Amazon Bedrock, a platform for hosting and fine-tuning generative models, Anthropic's Claude family of models are now being utilized by "tens of thousands" of customers.
"This has been a year of breakout growth for Claude, and our collaboration with Amazon has been instrumental in bringing Claude's capabilities to millions of end users," said Amodei.
Future prospects
Amazon's future plans with Anthropic's AI models
Amazon plans to integrate Anthropic's tech into its consumer products.
The tech giant is also reportedly planning to replace the in-house models powering Alexa, its virtual assistant, with those developed by Anthropic due to technical challenges.
This collaboration and investment have attracted regulatory scrutiny from authorities like the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the UK's Competition and Markets Authority.