Anthropic Snags Another $1B From Amazon; OpenAI Joins Data Center Push

Competitors Anthropic and OpenAI continue to refuse to take a back seat to each other when it comes to headline-grabbing news.

Anthropic, a ChatGPT rival with its AI assistant Claude, is reportedly taking in a fresh $1 billion investment from previous investor Google.

In October 2023, Google invested $2 billion in the OpenAI rival.

The new funding also comes just a couple of weeks after it was reported the startup was in advanced talks to raise $2 billion in a deal led by Lightspeed Venture Partners that would value it at $60 billion. Anthropic was last valued at $18.5 billion last February.

This deal also comes just two months after Amazon agreed to invest another $4 billion in an AI startup. That deal followed Amazon’s 2023 announcement 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.

That’s not all

The Anthropic news comes just after OpenAI made waves of its own, as the White House announced a new partnership between the ChatGPT developer, SoftBank and Oracle to help build out $100 billion to $500 billion in AI datacenters and infrastructure.

The new undertaking has been dubbed the Stargate Project.

Billions of dollars have been earmarked to build out new data centers for AI initiatives. Last year Amazon said it plans to invest $100 billion in AI data centers in the next decade, while OpenAI and Microsoft entered into a joint data center project that is expected to cost $100 billion.