Amazon invests another $4 billion in AI company Anthropic

Amazon is doubling its investment in Anthropic to $8 billion as part of a deep collaboration on artificial intelligence, the companies announced Friday.

The e-commerce and technology giant will remain a minority investor in Anthropic, having invested $4 billion in the artificial intelligence developer late last year and becoming its main cloud computing provider.

“The response from AWS customers developing generative AI applications powered by Anthropic in Amazon Bedrock has been remarkable,” said Matt Garman, head of AWS Cloud Computing.

“We will continue to push the boundaries of what customers can achieve with generative AI technologies. »

Amazon is investing another $4 billion in Anthropic as part of an expanded alliance that includes collaboration on “Trainium” hardware to power machine learning, according to the companies.

“We look forward to working with Amazon to train and power our most advanced AI models using AWS Trainium, and help unlock the full potential of their technology,” said Dario Amodei, general manager of Amazon. ‘Anthropic.

The announcement comes just days after the UK’s competition regulator cleared Google parent Alphabet’s investment in Anthropic following an investigation.

The Competition and Markets Authority concluded that the tech giant did not gain “material influence” over Anthropic following the deal, which was said to have cost $2 billion.

The UK regulator is one of several global regulators keen to police big tech companies and their partnerships with AI companies.

In September, the CMA cleared Amazon’s initial investment in Anthropic, saying it did not believe “a relevant merger situation had been created”.

Source: AFP