Amazon invests additional $4 billion into Claude developer Anthropic, co-developing AWS' own AI chip

Anthropic, the developer of the large-scale language model Claude, has announced an expansion of its partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to develop and deploy advanced AI systems. The expansion of the partnership will see Anthropic receive an additional $4 billion in investment.

Powering the next generation of AI development with AWS \ Anthropic
https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-amazon-trainium

Amazon pours another $4B into Anthropic, OpenAI's biggest rival - Ars Technica
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/11/amazon-pours-another-4b-into-anthropic-openais-biggest-rival/

Amazon has invested $4 billion in Anthropic to develop AI chatbots and AI chips based on AWS, bringing Amazon's investment in Anthropic to a total of $8 billion.

Amazon is investing 600 billion yen in AI company Anthropic and aiming to surpass Anthropic in AI development - GIGAZINE

The background to this huge investment is chip development. At the time of writing, the AI chip market is almost monopolized by NVIDIA, but some cloud providers such as AWS are developing their own AI-specific processors.

According to Anthropic, they are working with Annapurna Labs, AWS' silicon design and manufacturing company, to develop and optimize the next generation of Trainium , creating a low-level kernel that can interface directly with Trainium and contributing to the AWS Neuron software stack. Anthropic also said that they plan to work with Annapurna Labs' chip design team to 'extract maximum computational efficiency from the hardware and use this to train state-of-the-art underlying models.'

In addition, it has been reported that Anthropic will be developing Amazon's AI assistant, Alexa, based on Claude from around August 2024.

Will Amazon use Anthropic's Claude as the next-generation Alexa AI?

Anthropic said, 'Claude has become the core infrastructure for tens of thousands of companies seeking reliable, practical AI solutions at scale through Amazon Bedrock . For example, pharmaceutical company Pfizer is using Claude on Amazon Bedrock to accelerate the timeline of research and delivery of critical medicines, saving tens of millions of dollars in operational costs. Perplexity , an AI-powered search engine, is using Claude to provide more accurate responses twice as fast. And the European Parliament is using Claude to make 2.1 million official documents easier to instantly search and analyze in multiple languages, while reducing investigation time by 80%.' He strongly appealed to Claude, a major product.

Training and running AI models is very costly, and while Google and Meta have profitable core businesses separate from AI development, Anthropic and OpenAI are AI companies that require ongoing capital infusions to stay afloat, so Anthropic is likely to continue to receive significant investment.