Amazon doubles down on Anthropic with $25B investment, unveils its OpenAI cloud deal – GeekWire
Amazon now uses the same playbook as both of the top AI labs in the world.
Two months after investing $50 billion in OpenAI and securing a $100 billion cloud contract, Amazon announced a similar plan Monday with its first AI partner, Anthropic: up to $25 billion in new investment and a $100 billion-plus commitment to AWS over 10 years.
The agreement also secures Anthropic up to 5 gigawatts of capacity from Amazon’s custom Trainium chips, a direct counter to OpenAI’s claim last week that Anthropic is making “a misstep in not acquiring enough compute” and “operating on a reasonably small curve.”
In a blog post announcing Amazon’s extended deal, Anthropic acknowledged that increased consumer demand has strained its infrastructure, impacting reliability during peak hours — a strain AWS’ extension is designed to relieve.
For perspective, a large nuclear power plant produces about 1 gigawatt, so Anthropic gets the computing power of five nuclear plants.
As part of the agreement, the complete Claude Platform will be available directly within AWS, allowing customers to access Anthropic tools through their existing AWS account, billing, and security controls – a deeper integration than Claude offers in Amazon’s Bedrock marketplace.
Amazon is investing $5 billion in Anthropic now, and up to $20 billion is tied up in commercial ideas, in addition to the $8 billion it had invested, starting in 2023, when Amazon began supporting Anthropic.
The initial investment is at Anthropic’s latest valuation of $380 billion.
It comes as both Anthropic and OpenAI prepare for potential IPOs, with each company looking to demonstrate the long-term energy commitments expected by public market investors.
“Our users tell us that Claude is very important to the way they work, and we need to build the infrastructure to keep up with the rapidly growing demand,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in a statement, noting that more than 100,000 customers build on Claude using AWS.
Microsoft has also invested in both labs – putting more than $13 billion into OpenAI and up to $5 billion into Anthropic. Two Seattle-area tech giants are now placing similar bets on similar AI companies, each vying for position as AI reshapes the cloud market.
“Anthropic’s commitment to deploy its major language brands on AWS Trainium over the next decade demonstrates the progress we’ve made together in custom silicon,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a statement.
Anthropic’s cloud commitment includes Amazon’s Trainium2 through Trainium4, with the option to purchase future generations of Amazon’s custom silicon as they become available. The companies said about 1 gigawatt of Trainium2 and Trainium3 capacity will come online by the end of this year, and that Anthropic is currently using more than a million Trainium2 chips to train and serve Claude.
