New York: The Seattle-based tech giant Amazon announced on Wednesday that the company is pouring an additional $2.75 billion into Anthropic, bringing its total investment in the artificial intelligence startup to $4 billion.
Amazon will maintain a minority stake in San Francisco-based Anthropic, poised to be a rival of ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
"Generative AI is poised to be the most transformational technology of our time, and we believe our strategic collaboration with Anthropic will further improve our customers' experiences, and look forward to what's next," said Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of data and AI at AWS, Amazon's cloud computing subsidiary.
In September, Amazon announced a $1.25-billion investment in Anthropic, and said that it had plans to spend up to $4-billion. Over the past year, Anthropic, a San Francisco-based startup, closed five different funding deals worth about $7.3 billion.
According to the deal, Anthropic will use Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its “primary” cloud provider and will use Amazon’s custom chips for the construction, training and deployment of AI models. AWS customers, most of which are businesses, will be able to access models on Amazon’s platform, known as Bedrock.
The two companies are working together to develop foundation models, which are the building blocks of the generative artificial intelligence systems that have captured the world’s attention. Amazon’s investment in Anthropic is the latest in a string of big tech bets on AI startups amid mounting public and business interest. Earlier this month, US antitrust regulators said they are looking into these bets.
Google, for its part, has also invested in Anthropic. In a separate agreement for Google Cloud, Google agreed to invest $500 million in Anthropic in the form of a $2 billion capital infusion, with an additional $1,500 million to be invested in the company over time.
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