Amazon commits up to $4 billion to Anthropic

Background

Training and running large AI models needs huge amounts of computing power, so the cloud provider a model company works with matters a great deal.^[1]

What happened

On 25 September 2023 Anthropic announced that Amazon would invest up to $4 billion and take a minority stake in the company.^[1] Wikipedia reports an initial investment of $1.25 billion, with the remaining $2.75 billion invested in March 2024.^[2]

Key details

AWS became Anthropic's primary cloud provider for mission-critical workloads.^[1] Anthropic gained access to AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips, which it could use for training and for deploying models.^[1]

Anthropic also expanded support for Claude on Amazon Bedrock, the AWS service for running foundation models, including model customisation and fine-tuning.^[1]

Anthropic said that its governance, including the Long-Term Benefit Trust, was unchanged by the deal.^[1]

Compute is the computing power, usually supplied by chips in data centres, that is needed to train and run models. Companies that build large models often sign long-term cloud agreements to secure it, and an investment can come bundled with such an agreement.

Impact

The agreement tied Anthropic's infrastructure closely to AWS and gave Claude a route to Amazon's cloud customers through Bedrock. It also came with the chip access needed for training and serving models.