Amazon.com Inc. announced on Monday its plan to invest up to $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic. This investment will also result in Amazon acquiring a minority stake in the company. The goal of this partnership is to accelerate the development of future foundation models and make them accessible to customers of Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company’s cloud business.
Anthropic will utilize AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips as part of this collaboration. These chips will enable Anthropic to build, train, and deploy its future foundation models. Foundation models are versatile AI models that can generate a wide array of outputs across various tasks and applications, including text, image, and audio generation. Through joint efforts, Amazon and Anthropic will also work together to enhance Trainium and Inferentia technology.
Under this partnership, Anthropic will become primarily reliant on AWS as its cloud provider, leveraging AWS as the main platform for its workloads. As a commitment to AWS customers globally, Anthropic will provide them with access to future generations of its foundation models and grant them early access to unique customization features.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy expressed his enthusiasm for the collaboration, stating, “Our collaboration with Anthropic should help customers get even more value from these two capabilities: Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s new managed service for generative AI applications, and AWS Trainium, AWS’s AI training chip.”
In 2021, Anthropic introduced its AI assistant named Claude, which competes directly with ChatGPT.
Amazon’s stock (AMZN) showed a 0.8% increase in premarket trading and has gained 54% so far this year. In comparison, the S&P 500 (SPX) has experienced a 12.5% increase.
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