Why Amazon is investing $25bn into Anthropic in a major AI deal

Amazon is investing up to US$25 billion in Anthropic as the AI startup seeks to spend more than $100 billion on Amazon Web Services (AWS) over the next 10 years on Amazon’s cloud technologies.

The money Amazon has agreed to pour into Anthropic is on top of the $8 billion it has already invested, the technology giant said. Both companies have already been working together since 2023 to accelerate generative AI (Gen AI) adoption across industries to make it easier for customers to build, deploy and scale the technology.

“Our custom AI silicon offers high performance at significantly lower cost for customers, which is why it’s in such hot demand,” said Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon.

Part of the new agreement will include current and future generations of Trainium, Amazon’s custom AI chips, with Anthropic confirming it had secured up to five gigawatts of capacity for training and deploying its Claude AI models – including significant Trainium3 capacity expected to come online this year.

Anthropic is already using AWS Trainium and Graviton to deliver high levels of performance and cost efficiencies across Gen AI workloads. Amazon said it was allowing Anthropic to accelerate its growth with “the scale, cost-efficiency and security of AWS”.

Jassy added: “Anthropic’s commitment to run its large language models on AWS Trainium for the next decade reflects the progress we’ve made together on custom silicon, as we continue delivering the technology and infrastructure our customers need to build with Gen AI.”

Claude is one of the most popular model families on Amazon Bedrock currently, with more than 100,000 customers running the AI model family on AWS. Amazon added that it would be working with Anthropic to collaborate on Project Rainier – its $11 billion AWS AI infrastructure initiative in Indiana, which features one of the world’s largest AI compute clusters designed for training Anthropic’s Claude models.

“Our users tell us Claude is increasingly essential to how they work, and we need to build the infrastructure to keep pace with rapidly growing demand,” commented Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder of Anthropic. “Our collaboration with Amazon will allow us to continue advancing AI research while delivering Claude to our customers, including the more than 100,000 building on AWS.”

Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI employees in 2021 and has since become a strong AI business, best known for its Claude AI models. Its annualised revenue has risen above $30 billion, according to CNBC.

The extended partnership with Amazon comes shortly after Anthropic announced Project Glasswing, a partnership with companies like Cisco and Nvidia to harness its Mythos Preview model to detect cyber vulnerabilities online.

Mythos has been the subject of much debate after the announcement, with some arguing that it could undermine the security of financial systems and what AI developments like this could mean for the future of cybercrime.

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