Anthropic attracts further $5bn dollars from Amazon
Amazon’s cloud division will benefit significantly from a deepened partnership with Anthropic, an AI company best known for its Claude chatbot and coding tool. Amazon is investing another $5 billion dollars (€4.7 billion) in Anthropic, which could bring the total to $25 billion (€23.3 billion). The deal underlines the fierce competition in the AI sector and strengthens the relationship between the two firms. In return, Anthropic plans to spend more than $100 billion (€94.5 billion) over the next 10 years on Amazon’s cloud services and chips.
Amazon already held a substantial stake in Anthropic, having previously invested $8 billion (€7.5 billion). The collaboration has proven mutually beneficial. Amazon’s cloud operations gain access to a leading AI model and a major customer for its Trainium AI chips. Anthropic, in turn, taps into Amazon’s extensive network of corporate clients, with more than 100,000 companies using Claude models on Amazon Web Services.
Anthropic, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees, is expected to go public later this year. The firm is actively looking for ways to monetise its software and offset the substantial costs of AI development. After a $30 billion (€28.3 billion) funding round in February that valued the company at $380 billion (€359 billion), Anthropic has received further investment offers totalling more than $800 billion (€755.8 billion).
Securing chip supplies
The agreement underscores Anthropic’s need for enormous computing power to develop new versions of Claude. Like OpenAI, Anthropic has struck deals for the necessary chips and compute. Last week, Anthropic announced a partnership with Broadcom to obtain chips based on the tensor processing units from Google, which compete with Amazon’s Trainium line.
This partnership will give Anthropic access to around 3.5 gigawatts of computing power. In October, Anthropic confirmed an agreement with a unit of Alphabet Inc. to purchase up to 1 million specialised AI chips, a deal worth billions of dollars. In Monday’s announcement, Amazon stated that it would supply Anthropic with both general-purpose chips and AI accelerator chips, with the aim of providing a total computing capacity of 5 gigawatts.
Despite recent successes, including the popular AI tool Claude Code, Anthropic faces headwinds. A legal dispute with the US government over AI safety measures poses a threat to its operations. Amazon stresses that it remains a minority investor in Anthropic and has no representation on either the board of directors or the trust board. Future investments will depend on “certain commercial milestones”, according to Amazon.
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