The artificial intelligence business Anthropic, which was created by former OpenAI research leaders, has received an extra $4 billion investment from Amazon.
According to Anthropic, the San Francisco-based company responsible for the Claude chatbot and AI model, the new financing will increase the tech giant’s total investment to $8 billion. However, Amazon will continue to hold its minority investor status.
The agreement designates Amazon Web Services (AWS) as Anthropic’s principal cloud and training partner, even though Amazon remains a minority stakeholder. Anthropic is required to employ Amazon’s Trainium and Inferentia AI processors for the development of future foundation models as a critical element of the agreement, rather than relying on the technology of its competitor, Nvidia.
Additionally, Anthropic will collaborate with Amazon’s Annapurna Labs to create future generations of Trainium AI accelerator processors.
“Through deep technical collaboration, we’re writing low-level kernels that allow us to directly interface with the Trainium silicon, and contribute to the AWS Neuron software stack to strengthen Trainium. Our engineers work closely with Annapurna’s chip design team to extract maximum computational efficiency from the hardware, which we plan to leverage to train our most advanced foundation models”, the company stated in its press release.
This announcement is made in anticipation of Anthropic’s expenditures exceeding $2.7 billion by the conclusion of the year. The company has secured substantial resources to compete with rivals such as OpenAI in the swiftly evolving AI landscape, with previous funding rounds totaling $9.7 billion and an additional $4 billion from Amazon.
It also assists in the reduction of reliance on Nvidia, which has previously claimed the title of the most valuable company in the world due to its AI chip business, and not only helps Amazon expand the market for its AWS AI processors.
