Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced a $4 billion investment in Anthropic, making AWS the primary cloud provider and training partner for the company.
This investment brings Amazon’s total funding in Anthropic to $8 billion, maintaining a minority stake while deepening technical and commercial ties. To date, Anthropic has raised a total of $13.7 billion in venture capital, according to Crunchbase.
The partnership will accelerate the development of Anthropic’s advanced AI systems, including optimising AWS’s Trainium accelerators for machine learning workloads.
Anthropic and AWS’s Annapurna Labs are collaborating on future generations of Trainium hardware, focusing on low-level kernel development and AWS Neuron software stack improvements.
“Through deep technical collaboration, we’re writing low-level kernels that allow us to directly interface with the Trainium silicon, and contribute to the AWS Neuron software stack to strengthen Trainium,” said Anthropic in its blog post.
“Our engineers work closely with Annapurna’s chip design team to extract maximum computational efficiency from the hardware, which we plan to leverage to train our most advanced foundation models,” the company added
This hardware-software integration is aimed at maximising computational efficiency to support Anthropic’s foundation models.
According to a recent report, Amazon is planning to roll out its latest AI chip, Trainium 2, in the coming month. It has been already tested by Anthropic, Databricks, and Deutsche Telekom. Trainium 2 is part of Amazon’s larger strategy to optimise its data centre performance while reducing costs for Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers.
Anthropic said its Claude models, accessible through Amazon Bedrock, have become essential for businesses like Pfizer, Intuit, and Perplexity. These companies use Claude for tasks such as streamlining medical research, simplifying tax calculations, and enhancing AI-powered search. The European Parliament uses Claude to efficiently analyse millions of documents.
AWS’s security features allow organizations to deploy Anthropic’s AI models securely in environments such as AWS GovCloud and SageMaker for classified tasks. Government clients can access Claude’s capabilities through regulated cloud services, ensuring compliance with stringent requirements.
The company recently partnered with Palantir to provide its advanced AI model Claude to the US government for data analysis, and complex coding activities in projects of national security interest.
Anthropic rival OpenAI recently raised $6.6 billion at a valuation of $157 billion. The funding, led by existing investor Thrive Capital, has brought OpenAI’s total capital raised to $17.9 billion, according to Crunchbase. Thrive Capital contributed approximately $1.3 billion, with the option to invest an additional $1 billion at the same valuation through 2025.
Other major participants in this funding round include Microsoft, NVIDIA, SoftBank, Khosla Ventures, Altimeter Capital, Fidelity, and MGX.
Anthropic recently released an upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet model and the new Claude 3.5 Haiku, along with a public beta for an experimental feature called “computer use.”
Over the last few months, it has also released several updates to its 3.5 series of Claude models, introducing impactful new features like Claude Artifacts, the Analysis tool, and Visual PDF.
In the latest podcast episode with Lex Fridman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei revealed that their Opus model isn’t going anywhere, adding that Anthropic will release the much-anticipated update and launch Claude 3.5 Opus. He further said that Claude 4.0 will be released according to the usual business cycle.
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