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Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) will invest up to $4B in San Francisco-based artificial intelligence (AI) startup Anthropic, and pick a minority stake in the company as the two parties collaborate to advance generative AI.
The companies said will bring their technology and expertise in safer generative AI to accelerate the development of Anthropic’s future foundation models and make them widely accessible to Amazon Web Services, or AWS, customers.
AWS will become Anthropic’s main cloud provider for mission critical workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development. The AI-focused startup intends to run the majority of its workloads on AWS.
The companies added that Anthropic will also use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train and deploy its future foundation models, gaining from the price, performance, scale, and security of AWS.
The companies will also team up to develop future Trainium and Inferentia technology.
Anthropic also pledged to provide AWS customers globally with access to future generations of its foundation models through Amazon Bedrock — AWS’ managed service which provides secure access to the top foundation models.
The companies noted that Amazon developers and will be able to build with Anthropic models via Amazon Bedrock so they can use so they can incorporate generative AI into their work, enhance existing applications and create net-new customer experiences.
“Customers are quite excited about Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s new managed service that enables companies to use various foundation models to build generative AI applications on top of, as well as AWS Trainium, AWS’s AI training chip, and our collaboration with Anthropic should help customers get even more value from these two capabilities,” said Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.
The companies added that they are committing meaningful resources which are helping customers get started with Anthropic’s flagship AI model Claude and Claude 2 on Amazon Bedrock, including via the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center.
In a joint interview, the CEOs of Amazon’s cloud division and Anthropic said the current investment will be $1.25B with either company having the authority to trigger another $2.75B in funding by Amazon, according to a report from Reuters.
The companies did not disclose how much Amazon would now own of Anthropic. Amazon noted that it would not get a board seat, the report added.
The collaboration is perharps Amazon’s biggest answer yet to challenges from Microsoft (MSFT) and Alphabet’s (GOOGL) (GOOG) Google, smaller cloud competitors which have marketed or developed AI this year.
Since 2019, Microsoft has invested billions of dollars into its collaboration with OpenAI, creator of generative AI model ChatGPT.
In February, Anthropic selected Google Cloud as its cloud provider, and the partnership is aimed at co-developing AI computing systems. Google also participated in Anthropic’s $450M fundraise in May.
Amazon said that the pact is the latest AWS generative AI announcement as it expands its offering at all three layers of the generative AI stack.
At the bottom, AWS is offering compute instances from Nvidia (NVDA) and AWS’s own custom silicon chips, AWS Trainium for AI training and AWS Inferentia for AI inference. At the middle layer, AWS aims to provide customers foundation models; and at the top layer, AWS offers generative AI applications and services for customers such as Amazon CodeWhisperer.
