• Amazon has announced the completion of a $4 billion investment in generative AI company Anthropic.
• The investment comes on the back of a $1.25 billion deal made in September of last year.
• It now gives Amazon access to generative AI tools on par with what Microsoft has with OpenAI and Google’s Gemini offering.

All the big tech firms are choosing their horses to back in the generative AI race. Microsoft has invested heavily in OpenAI, Google has backed itself with Gemini, and now Amazon has further invested in Anthropic.

More specifically it has now invested a total of $4 billion in Anthropic, having invested a further $2.75 billion following a $1.25 investment back in September of last year.

The reason for the additional investment was an option to invest further into the company with more favourable terms potentially elapsing at the end of the first financial quarter of 2024. With the end of March on the horizon, Amazon did not want the option to fall away, especially as it believes generative AI will have an impact in a myriad of its platforms, and in particular its AWS hyper scaling business.

In fact, Anthropic appeared on stage at AWS re:Invent last year detailing what genAI would mean for the cloud business and customers of the hyperscaler down the line.

“As part of a strategic collaborative agreement, we and Anthropic announced that Anthropic is using Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud provider for mission critical workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development,” Amazon noted in a press release regarding the announcement.

“Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train, and deploy its future models and has made a long-term commitment to provide AWS customers around the world with access to future generations of its foundation models on Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s fully managed service that provides secure, easy access to the industry’s widest choice of high-performing, fully managed foundation models (FMs),” it continued.

Whether Anthropic’s Claude 3 platform will be able to match the performance of OpenAI’s GPT-4 or Google Gemini remains to be seen, but it is clear that Amazon has picked its horse.

“Anthropic’s visionary work with generative AI, most recently the introduction of its state-of-the art Claude 3 family of models, combined with Amazon’s best-in-class infrastructure like AWS Tranium and managed services like Amazon Bedrock further unlocks exciting opportunities for customers to quickly, securely, and responsibly innovate with generative AI,” enthused Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of Data and AI at AWS. 

“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,” he concluded.