Amazon has agreed to invest up to $25 billion in Anthropic, adding to its $8 billion investment in the AI startup in recent years. This expansion of their partnership will further develop their AI infrastructure.
Anthropic stated in a press release on the 20th that it is committed to investing over $100 billion in AWS technology over the next 10 years, including the use of current and future generations of Trainium chips. Anthropic already has up to 5 GW of computing power for training and deploying Claude models.
“Anthropic’s commitment to running large language models on AWS Trainium over the next 10 years reflects our progress in developing our own chips, and our continued commitment to providing customers with the technology and infrastructure they need to build generative AI,” said Amazon CEO Andy Jassy in the statement.
In February, Amazon stated that it expected to invest approximately $200 billion in capital this year, the vast majority of which would be allocated to AI infrastructure. This investment includes the $5 billion already invested in Anthropic, with up to a further $20 billion to be invested depending on “specific business milestones.” The initial investment is based on Anthropic’s latest valuation of $380 billion.
Anthropic aims to have its Trainium2 and Trainium3 combined reach a total capacity of 1 GW and be operational by the end of the year.
This investment by Amazon comes just two months after its $50 billion investment in Anthropic’s main competitor, OpenAI. These two AI startups are vying to convince investors of their growing strength, and both are expected to launch IPOs as early as this year. OpenAI executives have been criticizing Anthropic in recent months for “making a strategic mistake in not securing sufficient computing resources.”
Anthropic stated that the “significant increase” in demand for Claude from enterprise customers and developers, coupled with consumer usage, has placed “inevitable pressure” on its infrastructure, impacting service stability and performance. The new agreement with Amazon will allow for rapid scaling of computing power.
“Our users have told us that Claude is becoming increasingly important to their work methods, and we must build the corresponding infrastructure to keep up with the rapidly growing demand,” said Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. “The partnership with Amazon will enable us to continue advancing AI research while providing Claude to our customers, including over 100,000 enterprises developing on AWS.”
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