Amazon has agreed to invest up to $25 billion in Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the Claude chatbot, on top of the $8 billion it has already poured into the startup in recent years.
The investment includes $5 billion immediately at Anthropic's latest valuation of $380 billion, with up to $20 billion to follow subject to certain commercial milestones, the companies said on Monday.
In return, Anthropic has committed to spending more than $100 billion on Amazon Web Services technologies over the next 10 years, including current and future generations of Trainium, Amazon's custom AI chips.
Anthropic said it has secured up to 5 gigawatts of capacity for training and deploying its Claude models and expects to bring nearly 1 gigawatt of Trainium2 and Trainium3 capacity online by the end of this year.
The company said enterprise and developer demand for Claude, combined with a sharp rise in consumer usage, has created strain on its infrastructure that has affected reliability and performance.
"Our users tell us Claude is increasingly essential to how they work, and we need to build the infrastructure to keep pace with rapidly growing demand," said Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei.
Anthropic, which was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers and executives, has seen annualized revenue top $30 billion and counts more than 100,000 developers building on AWS.
The deal lands just two months after Amazon agreed to invest up to $50 billion in OpenAI, Anthropic's principal rival, as both companies race to strengthen their positions ahead of potential initial public offerings that could come as soon as this year.
OpenAI executives have publicly criticised Anthropic in recent months for what they called a strategic misstep in not acquiring enough compute capacity.
Anthropic named AWS its primary cloud provider in 2023 and primary training partner in 2024, but has also struck deals with competing platforms.
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Microsoft agreed in November to invest up to $5 billion in the company, with Anthropic committing to $30 billion of Azure compute, and earlier this month Anthropic expanded partnerships with Google and Broadcom for multiple gigawatts of additional capacity.
Amazon said in February that it expects to spend roughly $200 billion this year on capital expenditure, with most directed toward AI infrastructure.
The recap
- Amazon agrees to another $5 billion investment in Anthropic
- Anthropic commits to buying more than $100 billion of cloud services
- Amazon's total stake could reach $25 billion if milestones met
