In a pivotal move that reflects its ambition to compete with prominent AI rivals such as Google and Microsoft, it has come to light that Amazon is investing a staggering $2.75 billion in the San Francisco-based AI startup, Anthropic. This step marks Amazon’s largest external investment since its inception in 1994.
As integral parts of this deal, Anthropic is set to utilize Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud provider. The engineering team will also take advantage of AWS’s Trainium and Inferentia chips to construct, train, and implement their AI models.
Dating back to September, Amazon had proposed investing an initial $1.25 billion in Anthropic in exchange for acquiring a minor stake in the company. There was potential for this investment to rise up to a whopping $4 billion. It now seems the milestone has indeed been reached and surpassed with this week’s investment.
“Generative AI is poised to be the most transformational technology of our time, and we believe our strategic collaboration with Anthropic will further improve our customers’ experiences, and look forward to what’s next,” vocalised Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Data and AI at AWS.
Anthropic, currently the talk of the AI sector, has witnessed an astronomical growth in interest with around $7.3 billion in funding received in the past year alone. Among these backers are South Korea’s SK Telecom (SKT) who invested $100 million in the company with an ambitious plan to develop a multilingual large language model (LLM) customized for global telecom companies.
Notably, SKT is strenuously working towards becoming a world leader in AI as suggested by their Chief Financial Officer, Kim Jin Won, during an earnings call last year. This investment certainly forms a key part of their aim to transition into an AI-centric entity.
In a related development, this month AWS, Anthropic, and Accenture have joined hands with a mission to assist a host of organizations in heavily regulated industries like insurance, healthcare, and banking. They aim to help these organizations in adopting and scaling their generative AI solutions, to escalate their innovation and productivity quotient.
Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei aptly outlines this strategic partnership: “By combining Anthropic’s focus on model performance and safety, AWS’s approach to security and reliability, and Accenture’s deep domain expertise with technical know-how, we aim to build tailored solutions that enable key use cases.”
This development leaves one contemplating the massive leap in adoption and influence that generative AI technologies are set to make.
