Amazon.com Inc. Anthropic is investing an additional $5 billion in PBC, and could invest another $20 billion over time, a deal that deepens the companies’ relationship in the increasingly competitive AI industry.
Anthropic, which makes cloud chatbots and coding tools, plans to spend more than $100 billion over the next 10 years on Amazon’s cloud technologies and chips, the companies said in a statement on Monday.
Amazon was already one of Anthropic’s largest backers, with prior investments totaling $8 billion. For Amazon, the partnership gives its cloud business a leading AI model and a major customer for its home-made Trenium line of AI chips. Meanwhile, Anthropic has gained access to Amazon’s list of corporate customers. More than 100,000 customers run the cloud model on Amazon Web Services, the companies said.
Anthropic, founded in 2021 by several former OpenAI employees, is widely expected to hold an initial public offering as soon as this year. The AI company is trying to persuade more businesses to pay for its software to help offset the huge costs of developing the technology. Anthropic secured a $30 billion funding round in February, valuing the San Francisco-based startup at $380 billion, and has since received investor offers at a valuation of more than $800 billion.
The deal is the latest sign of Anthropic’s appetite for the vast processing power needed to build new versions of the cloud. Like OpenAI, Anthropic has signed a series of deals to secure the necessary chips and rent computing power. Anthropic said last week it would enlist Broadcom Inc. to supply chips based on Google’s tensor processing units, a rival to Amazon’s Trenium line. The collaboration between the three companies will give Anthropic access to approximately 3.5 gigawatts of computing power. Anthropic in October confirmed it would grab more than 1 million specialized AI chips from an Alphabet Inc. unit in a deal worth tens of billions of dollars.
In Monday’s announcement, Amazon said it would provide chips to Anthropic to deliver up to about 5 gigawatts of power for both general computing and AI accelerators.
While Anthropic has been on a winning streak this year with popular products including its Cloud Code AI tool, it has also been embroiled in a dispute with the US government over AI safeguards – a fight that has led to Anthropic taking legal action and which the company says threatens its business.
Amazon said it remains a minority investor, and is not represented on Anthropic’s board or trust. Amazon said the size of the future investment is tied to “certain commercial milestones.”
