Anthropic raises $4 billion more from Amazon

Large language model (LLM) developer Anthropic has announced raising an additional $4 billion investment from Amazon Inc. This latest funding takes Amazon’s total backing of Anthropic to $8 billion

In September, Amazon and Anthropic announced a partnership where Anthropic chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its main cloud provider.

Anthropic uses its AI model “Claude” for tasks like text generation and language understanding, and this model was made available on Amazon’s Bedrock platform—AWS’s service that allows businesses to access and integrate powerful AI models without building them from scratch.

Now, the partnership is expanding. Anthropic has named AWS its primary training partner, meaning it will use AWS’s specialized AI chips, Trainium and Inferentia, to train and run future versions of its AI models.

These chips are designed to boost the performance of AI workloads, and Amazon and Anthropic are working together to improve their capabilities.

“We’ll keep pushing the boundaries of what customers can achieve with generative AI technologies,” Matt Garman, the head of AWS, said, while highlighting the potential for innovation this partnership promises.

Anthropic, co-founded by former employees of ChatGPT maker OpenAI , has gained traction in recent times with its advanced AI models, making it a formidable rival to ChatGPT.

The Amazon deal is strategic for Anthropic as it transitions to utilizing Amazon’s Trainium and Inferentia chips, which are specially optimized for AI workloads.

Although Anthropic has used Nvidia chips, the terms of the deal necessitated prioritizing Amazon’s technology to align their collaboration and allow for maximum efficiency.

The partnership also includes joint efforts with Annapurna Labs, AWS’s silicon design hub, to design custom chips aimed at improving AI model training processes.

The company said in a release that its large language model ‘Claude’ has become the core infrastructure for several companies seeking reliable, practical AI solutions at scale through Amazon Bedrock.

Vaccine maker and pharmaceutical giant Pfizer uses the latest Claude models in Amazon Bedrock to accelerate research and delivery timelines for critical medicines while saving tens of millions in operational costs. Intuit uses Claude in Amazon Bedrock to explain complex tax calculations for millions of users during tax season, it said.

The company said Perplexity, an AI-powered search engine, delivers more accurate responses at twice the speed by using Claude in Amazon Bedrock. The European Parliament leverages Claude to power ‘Arc’ibot,’ making 2.1 million official documents instantly searchable and more accessible to analyze in multiple languages while reducing research time by 80%.

“This has been a year of breakout growth for Claude, and our collaboration with Amazon has been instrumental in bringing Claude’s capabilities to millions of end users across tens of thousands of customers on Amazon Bedrock,” said Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic. “We’re looking forward to working with Amazon to train and power our most advanced AI models using AWS Trainium, and helping to unlock the full potential of their technology.”