Amazon Doubles Down Investment In Anthropic

Amazon has agreed to invest another $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic, a ChatGPT rival with its AI assistant Claude.

It was just last fall when Amazon agreed to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic, a deal that gave the Seattle-based e-commerce and cloud titan a minority stake in the startup. The immediate investment was $1.25 billion, with the remaining $2.75 billion in funding coming earlier this year.

That deal included Anthropic naming Amazon Web Services its primary cloud provider, as well as using AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train and deploy its models.

This new investment means Amazon will have invested $8 billion into Anthropic, retaining its minority stake in the startup, per an Anthropic blog.

“Together with AWS, we’re laying the technological foundation—from silicon to software—that will power the next generation of AI research and development,” reads the blog. “By combining Anthropic’s expertise in frontier AI systems with AWS’s world-class infrastructure, we’re building a secure, enterprise-ready platform that gives organizations of all sizes access to the forefront of AI technology.”

Big money

Of course, Amazon is far from the only Big Tech firm to make big bets on AI startups.

Microsoft made a massive $10 billion investment in OpenAI back in January 2023. Since then, companies such as Nvidia, Salesforce 1 and Google have placed several bets.

Google also is an investor in Anthropic.

The big money deal with Amazon is actually only the second-biggest AI deal this week.

Elon Musk’s generative AI startup xAI raised $5 billion in a funding round valuing it at $50 billion, reported The Wall Street Journal. The new round includes investment from the Qatar Investment Authority, Valor Equity Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital.