Amazon will invest up to $25 billion in Anthropic, the artificial intelligence startup led by Dario Amodei and mainly known for the language model Claude: $5 billion will be provided immediately, and the other $20 billion are expected to come in the future.
WHAT AMAZON WANTS…
This is not Amazon’s first investment in Anthropic: on the contrary, the Seattle tech giant is one of the startup’s biggest backers, having already provided $8 billion. Moreover, Amazon has also bet on OpenAI – the creator of ChatGPT and the main rival of Anthropic – stating it intends to invest up to $50 billion there.
These partnerships allow Amazon to strengthen its presence in the artificial intelligence sector and secure customers for its computing power services, including cloud computing (its specialized division, Amazon Web Services, holds the largest share of this market globally) and microchips (it has developed an “accelerator” for training AI systems, called Trainium).
In short, Amazon is highly relevant in the AI infrastructure segment, while it has not managed to achieve comparable results with its own models, such as Nova.
… AND WHAT ANTHROPIC WANTS
On the other hand, Anthropic has developed very popular AI systems – the chatbot Claude and the coding agent Codex, for example – but it needs computing power to keep up in the “race” to develop increasingly performant models. For this reason, the startup said it plans to spend over $100 billion in ten years on Amazon’s cloud technologies and aims to obtain at least 1 gigawatt of computing power through Trainium2 and Trainium3 microchips by the end of 2026; it could even reach 5 GW.
The partnership with Big Tech will also allow Anthropic to expand into the corporate market – the one it is focusing on most – namely selling its AI systems to businesses. Over one hundred thousand customers already access Anthropic’s Claude models via Amazon Web Services.
MEANWHILE, BEZOS’ NEW COMPANY…
Meanwhile, Amazon’s founder and former CEO, Jeff Bezos, has launched his own artificial intelligence company that could soon reach a valuation of $38 billion. The company has a code name, Project Prometheus, is based in California, and specializes in applying AI to manual manufacturing processes, aiming to speed them up and make them more efficient.
According to the Financial Times, Project Prometheus is about to close a $10 billion funding round – with participation from JpMorgan and BlackRock – which would bring its valuation to $38 billion.
