AI Race Gets Hotter As Amazon To Invest Up To $4B In Startup Anthropic

Amazon has agreed to invest up to $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic — a ChatGPT rival with its AI assistant Claude.

The new investment gives the Seattle-based e-commerce and cloud titan a minority stake in Anthropic. The immediate investment is $1.25 billion, with either party having the right to trigger another $2.75 billion in funding, Reuters reported.

As part of the deal, Anthropic will now use Amazon Web Services data centers, as well as AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train and deploy its models.

Anthropic did not announce a new valuation with the round.

Big rounds

The new investment is just the latest in what has become a fundraising spree for Anthropic this year.

In February, it was reported that Google had invested between $300 million and $400 million in the startup.

In May, the company raised a $450 million Series C led by Spark Capital with participation from Google, Salesforce Ventures 1, Sound Ventures, Zoom Ventures and others. Anthropic did not release a valuation, but the round came after reports it was raising a round at a pre-investment valuation of $4.1 billion.

Finally, just last month, Anthropic raised a $100 million round from SK Telecom.

Amazon’s investment would be the second biggest announced this year if the $4 billion is reached. The deal lags behind only Microsoft’s massive $10 billion investment in OpenAI back in January.

The deal is just the latest example of big tech investing big into generative AI. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Nvidia and even Salesforce have all invested billions of dollars into AI startups — either directly from the company or through their respective VC arms.

The news of the Anthropic round also comes just about a week after The Financial Times reported that SoftBank is considering investing in ChatGPT creator OpenAI or one of its competitors.