Amazon invests another $2.75 billion in AI startup Anthropic
March 27 (UPI) — Amazon Wednesday put another $2.75 billion into Anthropic, bringing its total AI technology investment in the company to $4 billion, its biggest outside venture investment to date.
Amazon said in a statement that its strategic collaborative agreement with Anthropic will bring the most advanced generative artificial intelligence technologies to customers worldwide.
Amazon Web Services Vice President of Data and AI Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian said in a statement, “We have a notable history with Anthropic, together helping organizations of all sizes around the world to deploy advanced generative artificial intelligence applications across their organizations.”
Sivasubramanian added that generative AI “is poised to be the most transformational technology of our time.”
Anthropic’s AI chatbot Claude competes with ChatGPT and OpenAI as giant tech companies compete to develop AI in what is essentially a new tech frontier.
Amazon said Anthropic is using AWS as it primary cloud provider “for mission critical workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development.”
In the collaboration, Anthropic will use Amazon’s AWS Titanium and Inferentia chips to build, train and deploy future AI models.
Amazon announced its $4 billion investment in Anthropic in September 2023 for a minority ownership position and said then it would support Anthropic’s development.
The Wednesday announcement completes that $4 billion investment.
Amazon also said Wednesday that AWS, Anthropic and Accenture are joining forces to “help organizations — especially those in highly-regulated industries including healthcare, public sector, banking, and insurance — responsibly adopt and scale generative AI solutions.”
Counting Amazon’s investment, the San Francisco startup has closed five different investment deals in the past year totaling more than $10 billion.
Microsoft’s OpenAI investment is reportedly $13 billion, helping to propel OpenAI’s valuation to $29 billion.
