Amazon will invest another $4 billion into AI startup Anthropic, deepening its partnership with the rival to ChatGPT creator OpenAI. Amazon stock was slightly lower in Friday trading.
The tech giant announced the investment in a blog post Friday. The funding will double the $4 billion Amazon already invested into Anthropic earlier this year.
Anthropic is the developer of the chatbot Claude. Claude competes with OpenAI's ChatGPT, which launched the generative AI craze late in 2022. Amazon will remain a minority investor in Anthropic through the deal.
Amazon said Anthropic is naming the Amazon Web Services cloud business as its primary partner for training its AI models. The startup will also use AWS' custom Trainium and Inferentia chips to power its future foundation models.
"The response from AWS customers who are developing generative AI applications powered by Anthropic in Amazon Bedrock has been remarkable," AWS Chief Executive Matt Garman said in the blog post. "By continuing to deploy Anthropic models in Amazon Bedrock and collaborating with Anthropic on the development of our custom Trainium chips, we'll keep pushing the boundaries of what customers can achieve with generative AI technologies.
On the stock market today, Amazon stock was a fraction lower at 197.70. Shares broke below their 21-day moving average after declining 2% Thursday.
Amazon Stock: Race For AI Business
Amazon's partnership with Anthropic offers a counter to Microsoft's alignment with OpenAI. Microsoft is Amazon's closest competitor in the cloud-computing infrastructure market. Generative AI models need to be trained on huge sets of data, requiring significant cloud computing power. Cloud service providers are racing to win business from companies that develop the algorithms.
Amazon launched its Bedrock offering in April 2023. The service allows users of AWS to build generative AI applications.
On a call with analysts in late October, Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy said generative AI is a "multibillion-dollar revenue run rate business that continues to grow at a triple-digit" rate for AWS.
Amazon stock has gained 30.5% year-to-date. But shares have trended lower for the past week after reaching an all-time high of 215.90 on Nov. 14.
