Anthropic announced Monday that Amazon has agreed to invest $5 billion in a new company. This brings Amazon’s total investment in the company to $13 billion. Anthropic has agreed to invest more than $100 billion in AWS over the next 10 years, unlocking up to 5 GW of new computing capacity to train and run Claude.
The deal mirrors the agreement Amazon reached with OpenAI just two months ago. At the time, OpenAI participated in a $110 billion funding round ($50 billion contribution) that valued the ChatGPT maker at a pre-money valuation of $730 billion. The transaction also consisted in part of cloud infrastructure services rather than cash.
At the center of the deal are Amazon’s custom chips Graviton (a low-power CPU) and Trainium (an Nvidia competitor and AI accelerator chip). The Anthropic deal specifically covers Trainium2 through Trainium4 chips, even though the Trainium4 chip is not currently available. The latest chip, Trainium3, was released in December. Additionally, Anthropic has secured the option to purchase capacity for future Amazon chips when they become available.
We’ll find out if this news is a teaser for Anthropic announcing a new funding round. VCs have reportedly provided capital to AI companies in deals that value them at more than $800 billion.
