Amazon has announced a new investment of $4 billion in Anthropic, the developer behind Claude AI, raising its total funding commitment to $8 billion. This latest funding comes after a previous $1.25 billion injection last September and an additional $2.75 billion in March.
In a blog post, Amazon stated that Amazon Web Services (AWS) will serve as Anthropic’s “primary training partner.” As part of this collaboration, Anthropic will utilize AWS’s Trainium and Inferentia chips for its upcoming AI models.
This investment and enhanced partnership align with earlier reports from Reuters indicating that Claude will be the driving force behind Amazon’s revamped Alexa voice assistant. The new version of Alexa, which has faced delays in its release, is said to perform better with Claude compared to Amazon’s own AI model. The launch of this upgraded Alexa feature is now scheduled for 2025.
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Implications of the investment
The relationship between Amazon and Anthropic has already been strong, with Anthropic relying on AWS as its primary cloud provider and AI model training partner. This partnership is crucial for the development of Claude, which competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. With AWS now designated as Anthropic’s main cloud provider and supplier of training chips, Amazon aims to encourage developers to move away from Nvidia’s dominant chips.
Nvidia currently holds a commanding position in the market for advanced chips essential for generative AI, serving major clients like AWS, Microsoft, and Alphabet. However, these tech giants prefer to minimize costs by developing their own technologies instead of relying on external suppliers. Consequently, all three companies are working on creating their own chips. That said, Nvidia’s cutting-edge semiconductors remain significantly ahead of the competition.
As the AI sector expands, U.S. antitrust regulators are closely monitoring key players, including Microsoft, OpenAI, Amazon, Anthropic, and Alphabet. There are concerns that these tech behemoths may hold too much market power. Recently, the Department of Justice suggested that Google might need to divest its search business, highlighting the intense scrutiny that these major tech companies could soon face.
