Amazon is doubling down on its investment in Anthropic. The e-commerce giant will provide Anthropic with an additional $4 billion in funding on top of the $4 billion it pledged last year. Although Amazon remains a minority investor, Anthropic has agreed to make Amazon Web Services (AWS) its “primary cloud and training partner.”
Prior to today’s announcement, The Information reported that Amazon was hoping to raise additional funding contingent on a promise from Anthropic to use its own AI chips instead of NVIDIA’s silicon. It appears Amazon has its way, with the companies stating in separate press releases that Anthropic plans to use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train future underlying models.
Additionally, Anthropic says it will work with Amazon’s Annapurna Labs to develop future Trainium accelerators. “Through close technical collaboration, we are creating a low-level kernel that can interface directly with Trainium silicon and contributing to the AWS Neuron software stack to power Trainium,” the company said. “Our engineers are working closely with Annapurna’s chip design team to extract maximum computational efficiency from the hardware, which we will use to train our state-of-the-art foundational models.”
According to another recent report, Anthropic expects to burn through more than $2.7 billion by the time it closes. The company had raised $9.7 billion to date. Either way, the company has earned itself some much-needed runway as it aims to compete with OpenAI and other companies in the AI space.
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