Amazon has announced a $4 billion investment in AI company Anthropic to facilitate the development of generative AI models. This is the second significant commitment between Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Anthropic since 2023. Both companies released separate statements confirming the news.
“Today we’re announcing an expansion of our collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), deepening our work together to develop and deploy advanced AI systems”, reads the official blog post on Anthropic’s website.
Amazon first partnered with Anthropic in September 2023 in a deal initially worth $4 billion. As part of the agreement, Amazon Web Service adopted Anthropic’s Claude family of large language models (LLM). In exchange, AWS became the primary cloud service provider for Anthropic. According to Anthropic, this latest expansion will deepen their strategic collaboration to develop and deploy advanced AI systems. The total cost of this partnership now sits at $8 billion as of 2024.
See Related: Amazon Forays Into The World Of Generative AI With Amazon Bedrock
AWS Trainium And Inferentia Chips
AWS will now also be Anthropic’s main training partner. The AI company will utilize AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build its foundation models. The aim is to extract the maximum output from these chips to train the most advanced AI systems.
The companies will also give AWS customers early access to exclusive customization options for a limited period. Users can fine-tune Claude models on the Amazon Bedrock platform to cater to their needs. Additionally, the companies have set up discrete cloud environments for government customers.
AWS CEO Matt Garman claims customers have responded positively to this new development. “The response from AWS customers who are developing generative AI applications powered by Anthropic in Amazon Bedrock has been remarkable”, he added.
