Amazon said it will invest up to US$25 billion (A$34.93 billion) in Anthropic, on top of the $8 billion into AI in recent years, as part of an extended agreement to build out AI infrastructure.
In the announcement, the businesses said they are deepening their collaboration with a commitment from Anthropic to spend more than $100 billion over the next 10 years on AWS technologies.
"Our users tell us Claude is increasingly essential to how they work, and we need to build the infrastructure to keep pace with rapidly growing demand,” Anthropic CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei said.
Amazon has agreed to invest $5 billion in Anthropic today and up to $20 billion in future, tied to certain commercial milestones.
"Anthropic's commitment to run its large language models on AWS Trainium for the next decade reflects the progress we've made together on custom silicon, as we continue delivering the technology and infrastructure our customers need to build with generative AI,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said.
According to the release, Anthropic will secure up to 5 gigawatts of capacity to train and power its advanced AI models, like Tranium 3, which is expected to come online this year.
The deal between Amazon and Anthropic includes Trainium2, Trainium3, Trainium4, and the ability to purchase future generations of Trainium as they become available.
The collaboration will also lead to a meaningful expansion of international inference in Asia and Europe to better serve Claude’s growing international customer base.
This comes as Amazon says it expects to shell out roughly $200 billion this year on capital expenditures, mostly on AI infrastructure.
The deal also comes two months after Amazon agreed to invest up to $50 billion in Anthropic’s chief rival, OpenAI.
The two AI companies have been racing to convince investors of their strengthening positions ahead of potential IPOs that could land as soon as this year.
Anthropic was founded by a group of researchers who defected from OpenAI in 2021. The company has a valuation of $380 billion, and its annualised revenue has topped $30 billion.
Microsoft also invested up to $5 billion in Anthropic in November, and Anthropic said it committed to purchasing up to $30 billion of Azure computing capacity.
At the time of writing, Amazon (NASDAQ) shares dropped 0.91% to $248.28 but rose 2.66% in after-market trading to $254.89. Its market cap is $2.67 trillion.
