Amazon is in talks for a second substantial investment in AI startup Anthropic, potentially amounting to billions of dollars. This follows Amazon's $4 billion investment in Anthropic last year. A key condition of this investment is that Anthropic must use Amazon's custom chip-powered cloud servers for AI model training.
Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI executives Dario and Daniela Amodei, is considered OpenAI's main competitor. The company has raised $9.7 billion so far, nearly half of OpenAI's total fundraising. As Anthropic expands its AI products, it is projected to spend over $2.7 billion by 2024.
The negotiation centers on how extensively Anthropic will adopt Amazon's chips, which will impact the total investment. Using Amazon's Trainium chips presents technical challenges, as its accompanying software lacks the maturity of NVIDIA's CUDA software. Moreover, it could increase Anthropic's dependency on Amazon's infrastructure, limiting future alternatives.
Currently, Anthropic has agreed to use some Trainium servers but continues to rely primarily on NVIDIA's servers. Any new investment deal could involve convertible notes, converting into equity after additional fundraising. They are also discussing a cloud agreement to share revenue from selling Anthropic models to Amazon cloud customers, with Anthropic agreeing to rent Amazon's servers for development.
In addition to Amazon, Anthropic has partnered with Google in a smaller-scale cloud collaboration. Last year, Google pledged a $2 billion investment in Anthropic, but this is under investigation by the UK's Competition and Markets Authority to ensure it doesn't distort the AI market and promote a few dominant tech companies.
