Amazon announced it has made its biggest-ever investment, $2.75 billion, in OpenAI/Chat-GPT competitor Anthropic, another indication that the generative AI phenomenon continues to heat up.
Today’s news follows Amazon and Anthropic announcing an earlier $1.25 billion investment last September – the announcement today brings the total investment to $4 billion.
“We have a notable history with Anthropic, together helping organizations of all sizes around the world to deploy advanced generative artificial intelligence applications across their organizations,” said Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Data and AI at AWS in a blog that also said Anthropic is using AWS as its primary cloud provider for such workloads as safety research and foundation model development.
“Anthropic’s visionary work with generative AI, most recently the introduction of its state-of-the art Claude 3 family of models, combined with Amazon’s best-in-class infrastructure like AWS Tranium and managed services like Amazon Bedrock further unlocks exciting opportunities for customers to quickly, securely, and responsibly innovate with generative AI,” Sivasubramanian said.
Anthropic is a genAI high flyer. The company has closed five investment deals worth more than $7 billion not including funding from Amazon, according to a CNBC story. Anthropic launched Clause 3 last week and claims it outperforms other generative AI applications, including OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google Gemini.
Amazon said organizations are using Amazon Bedrock to build generative AI applications with Anthropic’s Claude AI. They include ADP, Amdocs, Bridgewater Associates, Broadridge, CelcomDigi, Cloudera, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Degas Ltd., Delta Air Lines, Genomics England, GoDaddy, Happy Fox, Intuit, KT, Lonely Planet, LexisNexis Legal & Professional, M1 Finance, Nexxiot, Perplexity AI, Pfizer, the PGA TOUR, Ricoh USA, Rocket Companies, and Siemens.
All three of the biggest cloud platforms have major investment in generative AI. Microsoft has invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI, and Google also has agreed to invest up to $2 billion in Anthropic.
