Amazon To Pump Another $4bn Into AI Start-Up Anthropic

Amazon is to invest an additional $4 billion (£3.2bn) in artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Anthropic, doubling its stake as investors rush to place their bets on emerging generative AI firms.

The e-commerce giant remains a minority investor following the investment, said Anthropic, which is best known for its Claude chatbot.

As with Amazon’s previous investment the current round takes the form of convertible notes and will come in phases, beginning with a tranche of $1.3bn.

Anthropic is in talks with additional investors to raise more capital on the back of the Amazon funding, Reuters reported, citing unnamed people.

AI chips

Under the deal Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud unit, will be named Anthropic’s “primary training partner”.

Anthropic will also use Trainium AI training chip and its Inferentia inference chip to train and deploy its foundation models.

Amazon’s custom AI chips compete with those of market leader Nvidia and the move allows Amazon to promote the chips to its cloud customers.

The chips and others are developed through Amazon’s Annapurna Labs, which Anthropic said it is working closely with on processor development.

Co-founded by former OpenAI executives Dario and Daniela Amodei, Anthropic said last year it had received a $500m investment from Google parent Alphabet and that the company would invest another $1.5bn over time.

Competition concerns

In September the UK competition regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), cleared Amazon’s earlier $4bn investment into the start-up, saying the deal did not meet its threshold for a more in-depth review.

The CMA probe began in August amidst wider concern that a small number of tech companies were controlling the emerging generative AI field, but the regulator found the combined revenue and market share of Anthropic and Amazon in the UK were not large enough to require an in-depth inquiry under the UK’s merger rules.

Last week the CMA similarly cleared Alphabet’s Anthropic investment, even as Alphabet subsidiary Google faces a potential break-up of its business in the United States.