The AI scene is shifting so quickly. Earlier this year, up-and-coming Anthropic partnered with Google, taking a $300 million investment for a reported 10% stake and making the Big Tech firm its “preferred cloud provider, giving [Anthropic] the compute power necessary to build reliable and trustworthy AI systems.”
But that was, what, nine months ago? Ancient news. Now, Anthropic has a new BFF in Amazon’s cloud unit, which has been willing to invest a lot more—up to $4 billion, for an as-yet-undisclosed minority stake—and which now becomes Anthropic’s “primary cloud provider for mission critical workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development.”
Anthropic’s models will underpin the genAI features in Amazon’s own processes, too, and Anthropic will even have a hand in the future development of Amazon Web Services’ in-house AI chips, Trainium and Inferentia. The two companies seem to be in this for the long haul—or at least, longer than nine months.
If AWS's investment does approach $4 billion (TechCrunch reports that the initial outlay is $1.25 billion) then it will be the unit’s biggest-ever investment.
For Anthropic, founded by defectors from ChatGPT maker OpenAI, this deal is largely about being able to pay for the massive costs that it faces as it trains up the successor to Claude 2, the chatbot that this month became available to consumers. “Training state-of-the-art models requires extensive resources including compute power and research programs,” it said in its announcement. “Amazon’s investment and supply of AWS Trainium and Inferentia technology will ensure we’re equipped to continue advancing the frontier of AI safety and research.”
But for AWS, the biggest cloud provider with nearly a third of the market, it’s a matter of staying relevant. Every Big Tech firm needs to have a serious AI play these days—and Anthropic is way ahead of what Amazon has developed thus far—but those who are major cloud providers are also racing to meet the infrastructural needs of the new breed of AI startups.
One of the biggest benefits to Microsoft of its $13 billion-ish partnership with OpenAI is the fact that its Azure cloud business benefits from all those developers building on OpenAI’s platform. The Amazon-Anthropic deal is different in that it isn't exclusive, but Anthropic will now give AWS a sweetener for its customers, in the form of early access to “unique features for model customization and fine-tuning capabilities.” Little wonder that Amazon’s share price began today with a jump of 1.4%.
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David Meyer
