Anthropic said Friday that Amazon, a longtime backer of the company, had invested an additional $4 billion in the artificial intelligence startup, doubling its investment in the firm known for its chatbot GenAI Claude.

According to Xira data, 82 percent of companies are investing or looking to invest in AI this year. Currently, 37 percent of companies are already investing in AI, 32 percent are planning to invest, and 17 percent are looking to invest.

Amazon to continue investing in AI

Amazon will maintain its position as a minority investor and will be Anthropic’s primary training partner for AI models, the startup said.

It is worth mentioning that Amazon, which is Anthropic’s primary cloud partner, is fiercely competing with Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google to offer AI-powered tools for its cloud customers.

The e-commerce company’s largest investment in Anthropic underscores the billions of dollars funneled into AI startups over the past year as investors look to capitalize on the boom in generative AI technology, made popular by OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in late 2022.

Microsoft-backed OpenAI last month raised $6.6 billion from investors, potentially valuing the company at $157 billion and cementing its position as one of the world’s most valuable private companies.

Anthropic plans to train and deploy its base models on Amazon’s Trainium and Inferentia chips. The intensive process of training AI models requires powerful processors, making obtaining expensive AI chips a top priority for startups.

Nvidia currently dominates the AI ​​processor market and counts Amazon among its long list of so-called hyperscaler customers.

Still, Amazon has been working to develop its own chips through its Annapurna Labs division, which Anthropic said it was “working closely” with to help develop processors.

Britain’s competition regulator had said in September that Amazon’s partnership with Anthropic would not be referred for further investigation as it was not under its jurisdiction.

Anthropic, co-founded by former OpenAI executives and siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, said last year it had also secured a $500 million investment from Alphabet, which promised to invest another $1.5 billion over time.

The startup also uses Alphabet’s Google Cloud services as part of its operations.

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