Amazon said Wednesday that it has invested an additional $2.75 billion in Anthropic, completing a $4 billion deal with the artificial intelligence startup from late last year. Amazon stock edged higher in afternoon trades.
In a deal first announced in September, Amazon committed an initial $1.25 billion to Anthropic for an investment deal worth up to $4 billion. Anthropic is the developer of the chatbot Claude. Claude competes with OpenAI's ChatGPT, which launched the generative AI craze late in 2022. The San Francisco-based Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI researchers. Google parent company Alphabet is also an investor in Anthropic.
Amazon's initial investment was seen by analysts as a counter to Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI. Microsoft is Amazon's closest competitor in the cloud-computing infrastructure market. Amazon launched its Bedrock offering in April. The service allows users of Amazon's cloud-computing division, Amazon Web Services, to build generative AI applications.
As part of the first Amazon investment, Anthropic said it would use Amazon Web Services as its primary cloud provider. Anthropic also said it would use Amazon's specialized computing chips, including AWS Trainium.
"Anthropic's visionary work with generative AI, most recently the introduction of its state-of-the art Claude 3 family of models, combined with Amazon's best-in-class infrastructure like AWS Trainium and managed services like Amazon Bedrock, further unlocks exciting opportunities for customers to quickly, securely, and responsibly innovate with generative AI," Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Data and AI at AWS, said in a blog post Wednesday.
Amazon Stock: Push To Be AI Leader
Last week, Amazon announced a partnership with Anthropic and Accenture to help enterprises adopt generative AI tools. Amazon also announced several new joint initiatives with Nvidia, the market leader for the computing chips that power AI models.
On the stock market today, Amazon stock is up less than 0.5% at 178.86 in recent action. Amazon stock has gained about 20% this year. But shares have hovered between 170 and 180 in recent weeks.
