- Amazon invests an additional $2.75 billion in AI firm Anthropic, bringing its total investment to $4 billion.
- Anthropic will utilize Amazon’s Trainium and Inferentia chips for model training and deployment on AWS cloud.
- The collaboration aims to advance generative AI capabilities, providing customers with innovative opportunities while addressing challenges faced by AI startups.
OUR TAKE
The close collaboration between Anthropic and Amazon will enable the AI startup to work more securely. Funding and resources are major challenges for many AI startups, with many seeking partnerships with large tech companies like Microsoft and Amazon for a more sustainable path to growth.
— Chloe Chen, BTW Media reporter
Amazon has announced an additional $2.75 billion investment in the AI company Anthropic, following last year’s $1.25 billion investment, bringing Amazon’s total investment in Anthropic to $4 billion. As part of the investment agreement, Amazon gains minority equity in Anthropic and the ability to participate in the company’s development direction. Additionally, Amazon will integrate Anthropic’s models into its Amazon Bedrock service, a fully managed service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help developers integrate generative AI capabilities into their applications and services.
Also read: FTX to sell majority of stake in Anthropic for US$884 million
Also read: Amazon pays $650 million for a nuclear-powered data centre
Anthropic will utilise Trainium and Inferentia chips on the AWS cloud
Another significant aspect of the agreement is that Anthropic will utilise Trainium and Inferentia chips on the AWS cloud for training and deploying its models. Furthermore, Anthropic will collaborate with Amazon to advance the Trainium and Inferentia technologies.
As is well known, generative AI requires significant power consumption. Trainium and Inferentia chips are technologies developed by Amazon to address this challenge. Trainium is designed specifically for training generative AI models and can save up to 50% of training costs compared to equivalent Amazon EC2 instances. Inferentia chips help models generate inference results faster and at lower cost, with a 40% improvement in cost-effectiveness.
Amazon and Anthropic have maintained close cooperation
Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of Data and AI at Amazon AWS, commented on the collaboration, stating, “Amazon and Anthropic have maintained close cooperation, helping organisations worldwide deploy advanced generative AI applications. Anthropic’s vision and insight in the field of generative AI, such as the recent launch of the state-of-the-art Claude 3 series models, combined with Amazon’s top-notch infrastructure (such as AWS Trainium) and managed services (such as Amazon Bedrock), will further provide customers with exciting opportunities to innovate with generative AI rapidly, securely, and responsibly.”
