Athira Sethu
Kochi, 8 November 2024
Amazon is negotiating a second investment in the artificial intelligence (AI) startup- Anthropic, reports said. The new agreement could amount to billions of dollars and will further cement Amazon’s presence in the booming AI industry.
Amazon’s cloud services unit, Amazon Web Services (AWS), is already quite integrated with Anthropic. In 2022, it invested $4 billion in the AI startup, which, like ChatGPT, was developed by OpenAI. The deal also entitled the customers of the e- commerce giant to access the innovative AI tech from Anthropic.
Besides cash investment, Amazon has also been supporting Anthropic through its cloud infrastructure. The AI startup has been using AWS services of the cloud to train its AI models, and Amazon reportedly made Anthropic use a large number of Amazon’s servers. These serve on chips developed by Amazon, though Anthropic prefers AI chips designed by Nvidia, one of the top players in the industry with AI hardware.
The company is founded by Dario and Daniela Amodei, who were former executives of OpenAI. It scaled fast, and only recently, it has inked a deal with Alphabet-the parent firm of, Google worth a fresh investment of $500 million. Moreover, it agreed to future investment of another $1.5 billion, making it one of the best-funded AI startups.
Global giants like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are competing over investments with some of the most promising startups. Beyond just giving capital injections, access to innovative new AI technology opens the doorway to letting tech giants deploy those technologies into more of their products and services.
For Amazon, an interest in Anthropic represents the enhanced role of AI in its business strategy. “As AI continues to advance, Amazon is keen on staying ahead of this fast-changing industry, both by supporting AI startups and applying the newest AI technologies in its cloud services.”
