Amazon announces additional $4B investment into Anthropic

Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) said on Friday that it will invest an additional $4B into generative artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, while simultaneously unveiling a deeper collaboration between the two companies.

Shares of the tech giant were up more than 1% in premarket trading.

As part of the deeper collaboration, Amazon Web Services will become Anthropic’s primary training partner and the maker of the Claude AI chatbot will use Amazon’s Trainium processors to train and deploy its largest foundation models.

Anthropic has traditionally used chips created by Nvidia (NVDA), which dominates the AI accelerator market with an estimated market share north of 70%.

“The response from AWS customers who are developing generative AI applications powered by Anthropic in Amazon Bedrock has been remarkable,” said Amazon Web Services Chief Executive Matt Garman in a statement. “By continuing to deploy Anthropic models in Amazon Bedrock and collaborating with Anthropic on the development of our custom Trainium chips, we’ll keep pushing the boundaries of what customers can achieve with generative AI technologies. We’ve been impressed by Anthropic’s pace of innovation and commitment to responsible development of generative AI, and look forward to deepening our collaboration.”

“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,” Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei added.

It was reported earlier this month that Amazon was considering making an added investment into Anthropic.

Amazon did not say what the new investment would value Anthropic at, however, media reports have suggested Anthropic is looking to raise funds at a $40B valuation.

Amazon previously invested $4B into San Francisco-based Anthropic, including a $2.75B tranche that came this past March. Other investors include Google (GOOG) (GOOGL) and Salesforce (CRM).