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Founded in 2021 by former Open AI executives, Anthropic is now one of the most well-funded AI firms in the world
Amazon has announced an investment of $2.75 billion in San Francisco-based AI startup Anthropic, as it looks to compete with AI rivals such as Google and Microsoft through its AI chatbot Claude.
The move is Amazon’s largest external investment since it was founded in 1994.
As part of the deal, Anthropic will use Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud provider, as well as using AWS’s Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train, and deploy AI models.
Back in September, Amazon announced that it would invest an initial $1.25 billion in Anthropic in exchange for a minority stake in the business, with the possibility that the investment could reach up to $4 billion. With this week’s investment, that milestone has now been hit.
“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 Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Data and AI at AWS in Amazon’s press release.
Interest in Anthropic is growing at a meteoric pace, having received around $7.3 billion in funding over the past year alone.
Part of this backing has come from South Korea’s SK Telecom (SKT), which invested $100 million in the company in an effort to develop a multilingual large language model (LLM) customised for global telcos.
SKT currently has ambitions of becoming a world leader in AI, with Chief Financial Officer Kim Jin Won saying on an earnings call last year that the company was “stepping up efforts on all fronts to transform itself into an AI company”.
In related news, this month AWS, Anthropic, and Accenture joined forces to help organisations in highly regulated industries – such as healthcare, banking and insurance – to adopt and scale generative AI solutions so that their organisations can improve innovation and productivity.
“By combining Anthropic’s focus on model performance and safety, AWS’s approach to security and reliability, and Accenture’s deep domain expertise with technical know-how, we aim to build tailored solutions that enable key use cases,” said Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei in a statement.
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