OpenAI’s close rival Anthropic has raised an additional $4 billion from Amazon and agreed to make Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing division, the primary location for training its flagship generative AI models.
Anthropic also said it is working with Annapurna Labs, AWS’ chip manufacturing division, to develop the next generation of the Trainium accelerator, AWS’s custom chip for training AI models.
“Our engineers plan to work closely with Annapurna’s chip design team to extract maximum computational efficiency from the hardware, leveraging this to train our most advanced foundational models,” Anthropic wrote in a blog post. “Together with AWS, we are building the technology foundation that will power the next generation of AI research and development, from silicon to software.”
Amazon’s new cash injection brings the tech giant’s total investment in Anthropic to $8 billion, but maintains its status as a minority investor in Amazon, Anthropic says. To date, Anthropic has raised $13.7 billion in venture capital, according to Crunchbase data.
The Information reported earlier this month that Amazon was in talks to invest billions of dollars in Anthropic. This is the first financial commitment for the company since last year’s deal. The new investment is said to be similar to the previous one, but with some changes. Amazon insisted that Anthropic train its AI using Amazon-developed silicon hosted on AWS.
Anthropic says it prefers Nvidia chips. But maybe the money was too good to give up. Earlier this year, Anthropic reportedly expected to burn more than $2.7 billion in 2024 as it trains and scales its AI products. Anthropic has been discussing $40 billion worth of new funding for months, according to The Information, and the pressure is undoubtedly on to finalize something soon.
Anthropic notes that its collaboration with AWS has expanded over the years. Anthropic’s Claude family of models is being used by “tens of thousands” of companies through Amazon Bedrock, a platform for model hosting and fine-tuning on AWS, Anthropic said in a blog post.
Recently, Anthropic partnered with AWS and Palantir to provide U.S. intelligence and defense agencies access to Claude.
In addition to AWS, Amazon is said to be working with Anthropic to strengthen Anthropic’s consumer products. Amazon will reportedly replace its internal model that powers its AI assistant Alexa with one from Anthropic after encountering technical issues.
Anthropic continues to keep pace with other leading AI labs, including OpenAI, as we launch new features like Computer Use, which allows our current best models to perform tasks automatically on your PC. But the company also had its share of difficulties. The price of one of its models recently increased unexpectedly. And it appears that the release schedule for the next-generation top-of-the-line Claude model, the 3.5 Opus, has been delayed.
