By Greg Bensinger
April 20 (Reuters) – Amazon said on Monday that it will invest up to $25 billion in Anthropic, as the AI startup commits to spending more than $100 billion over the next 10 years on Amazon’s cloud technologies.
The deal deepens the two firms’ relationship as Anthropic rushes to secure capacity to bolster its models.
Seattle-based Amazon will invest $5 billion in Anthropic now, and an additional $20 billion in the future, subject to certain commercial milestones. This is in addition to the $8 billion Amazon previously invested in the company.
Amazon has struggled to generate buzz around its own AI models, such as Nova, while continuing to be a leader in providing critical infrastructure for the AI boom, such as cloud computing power. Amazon said it anticipates around $200 billion this year on capital expenditures, largely for AI development.
Amazon is also making big bets on the largest AI startups. The new investment in Anthropic, the creator of Claude, follows Amazon’s announcement earlier this year it would invest up to $50 billion in OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.
In a statement, Anthropic said it expected to bring roughly 1 gigawatt of capacity via Trainium2 and Trainium3 chips by year-end. Anthropic ultimately expects to secure up to 5 gigawatts of such capacity.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a statement that Anthropic’s use of Trainium chips “reflects the progress we’ve made together on custom silicon.”
Anthropic is aiming to pull ahead in the AI race with model releases focusing on coding and design, while Amazon seeks customers for its custom silicon chips built for artificial intelligence training and inference.
Amazon shares rose around 2.7% in extended trading.
(Reporting by Zaheer Kachwala in Bengaluru; Editing by Pooja Desai and Lisa Shumaker)
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