AWS bet big on Anthropic in the race against Microsoft and OpenAI, now it’s doubling down
AWS has announced another round of investment into AI startup Anthropic, doubling down on a previous $4 billion investment recently approved by a UK regulator.
The firm will invest a further $4 billion into Anthropic, AWS said, and will build on its partnership with the AI developer through expanded collaboration in the training process.
Where the last investment set AWS as Anthropic’s primary cloud provider, this announcement will see AWS become Anthropic’s primary training partner as well. Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy future foundation models.
This move will enhance the performance, security, and privacy that Amazon Bedrock provides for customers running Anthropic’s Claude models, AWS said.
As a bonus, both firms will provide AWS customers early access to fine-tuning capabilities with their own data on Anthropic models. This level of customization will be available specifically to AWS customers for a period of time on new Claude models.
“The response from AWS customers who are developing generative AI applications powered by Anthropic in Amazon Bedrock has been remarkable,” AWS CEO Matt Garman said.
“By continuing to deploy Anthropic models in Amazon Bedrock and 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,” he said.
AWS has also been impressed by Anthropic’s pace of innovation and commitment to responsible AI development, the CEO added.
“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 across tens of thousands of customers on Amazon Bedrock,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said.
“We’re looking forward to working with Amazon to train and power our most advanced AI models using AWS Trainium, and helping to unlock the full potential of their technology,” he added.
AWS all in on Anthropic
This latest pledge by AWS brings its total investment in Anthropic to $8 billion following a $4 billion commitment made in September 2023, which looked to strengthen the generative AI potential of its bedrock offering.
This marked a notable strategic move by AWS at the time, which the company said would help accelerate the development of Anthropic’s future foundation models and provide access to AWS customers.
In August 2024, though, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced it would probe the deal. The CMA said the investment may necessitate further investigation at the time.
A few months later, the CMA approved the deal, saying that Amazon’s partnership with the firm did not qualify for investigation under merger provisions of the UK’s ‘Enterprise Act.’
AWS isn’t the only one in pursuit of Anthropic. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, announced a $2 billion investment into the startup which was investigated and subsequently approved by the CMA.
Alphabet committed a further $300 billion to Anthropic before that in return for a 10% stake, according to reporting from the Financial Times.
Microsoft’s AI spending spree
AWS and Google’s initial backing for Anthropic came at a time when both were playing catch-up with Microsoft in the generative AI race. The two tech giants appeared to view Anthropic as the champion they needed in the industry akin to Microsoft’s close relationship with OpenAI.
Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI in recent years has been significant. As of January 2024, the tech giant had pledged more than $13 billion in support for the startup, and $10 billion of that was invested in 2023 alone.
The close ties between the two firms have also prompted regulatory scrutiny, however. The UK’s CMA, US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and EU regulators have all launched probes into the scope of the relationship between the companies.
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