Amazon considering new multi-billion investment in Anthropic: There’s a catch
Amazon is reportedly considering an additional multi-billion dollar investment in artificial intelligence startup Anthropic. The talks follow Amazon’s earlier $4 billion stake in March, which positioned Amazon Web Services (AWS) as Anthropic's primary cloud provider and facilitated Anthropic’s ongoing AI development efforts.
The existing partnership has allowed Anthropic to leverage AWS’s specialized Trainium and Inferentia chips to construct, train, and deploy AI models. Under this collaboration, Anthropic also committed to making its foundational AI models accessible to AWS customers through Amazon Bedrock, a managed service that hosts various generative AI models. These resources are intended to support AI safety research and help companies develop generative AI applications.
If a new agreement is reached, Anthropic would increase its usage of AWS servers equipped with Amazon's proprietary chips, although sources close to the discussions say Anthropic prefers to use servers running Nvidia-designed AI chips. Both Amazon and Anthropic have declined to comment on the negotiations.
"Amazon has asked Anthropic, which uses Amazon's cloud services to train its AI model, to use a large number of servers powered by chips developed by the cloud computing major," the source told The Information.
Amazon’s strategic emphasis on its own chips reflects its drive to expand AWS’s position as a leader in AI infrastructure. By encouraging Anthropic to adopt its custom chips more broadly, Amazon is likely aiming to demonstrate the viability of its AI chip offerings in large-scale applications and position itself as an adequate Nvidia alternative. Nvidia is once again the world’s most valuable company after its shares hit a record high of $146.49 on the back of Trump’s reelection.
Founded by former OpenAI executives Dario and Daniela Amodei, Anthropic has quickly gained traction as an AI startup, receiving previous investments from Alphabet, which committed $500 million upfront and pledged an additional $1.5 billion over time.
