Amazon invests another $2.75B in AI-startup Anthropic

Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) is making a significant financial commitment to artificial intelligence technology with another $2.75B strategic investment in AI startup Anthropic, bringing its total investment in the company to $4B.

Anthropic’s Claude 3 chatbot competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT which is backed by Microsoft (MSFT). For Amazon (AMZN), this is the largest outside investment for the company following a $1.3B investment in EV-maker Rivian (RIVN).

The collaboration enables Anthropic to use Amazon Web Services as its primary cloud provider for mission critical workloads and will provide AWS customers with access to future generations of its foundation models on Amazon Bedrock.

“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,” Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of Data and AI at AWS said in a statement.

The investment will give Amazon (AMZN) a minority stake in Anthropic but without a board seat. Anthropic was last valued at $18.4B, according to sources cited by CNBC and counts Google (GOOG, GOOGL) and Salesforce (CRM) among its backers.