Amazon’s Massive $4 Billion Investment in Anthropic – Is This How AWS Will Dominate AI?

Amazon is investing an additional $4 billion in the AI startup Anthropic as major tech companies rush to fund generative AI.

With this new investment, Amazon’s total investment in Anthropic since last year now amounts to $8 billion.

On Saturday, Amazon announced that Anthropic will designate Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing unit, as its primary training partner under this agreement.

The companies plan to implement additional training and deployment for a sophisticated system that supports general-purpose AI services, such as ChatGPT and Google’s Bard chatbot. Two AWS chips will serve as the foundation for future advancements in AI.

Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services, explained that AWS is deeply impressed by Anthropic’s pace of innovation and its commitment to the responsible development of generative AI. Garman emphasized that AWS looks forward to deepening its collaboration with Anthropic.

Anthropic, founded by former leaders of OpenAI, maintains its status as a minority investor in the company. Despite growing interest, regulators in both the U.S. and internationally are closely monitoring the ties between large tech firms and AI startups.

However, in September, Amazon received positive news when the UK’s competition watchdog determined that an in-depth investigation was unnecessary. Anthropic’s revenue and market share with Amazon were not significant enough under UK merger rules.