According to foreign media reports, on Monday local time, Amazon announced that it will invest up to $4 billion in American artificial intelligence company Anthropic to consolidate its position in the booming field of artificial intelligence technology.
Amazon’s initial investment will be $1.25 billion to acquire a minority stake in Anthropic, and the two companies have the option to increase their total investment to $4 billion.
As part of the protocol, Anthropic will utilize Amazon’s cloud computing platform and dedicated artificial intelligence chips to develop its model.
Amazon stated that Anthropic will use Amazon Cloud Services (AWS) Training and Inferentia chips to build, train, and deploy its future basic models, and benefit from AWS’s price, performance, scale, and security. AWS will become the main cloud provider for Antiopic’s critical task workloads, including security research and future basic model development.
Anthropic stated that based on the huge demand from AWS customers for Claude, the company will also expand its support for Amazon Bedlock, which will include secure model customization and fine-tuning of services, allowing enterprises to utilize their professional knowledge to optimize Claude’s performance while limiting the possibility of harmful results.
Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI researchers in 2021 and is headquartered in San Francisco. The company has developed the chat robot Claude.
At present, the company is competing with OpenAI, the developer behind the chat robot ChatGPT, and its chat robot Claude is seen as the main competitor of OpenAI GPT-4.
In May of this year, Aerospace announced the acquisition of $450 million in Series C financing. This round of financing is led by Spark Capital, with participation from Google, Salesforce Ventures, Sound Ventures, Zoom Ventures, and others.
This round of financing has brought the total financing amount of Anthropic to nearly $1 billion, making it one of the most fully funded artificial intelligence startups. The company did not disclose its valuation, but sources say its valuation is close to $5 billion. Prior to this round of financing, Google had already invested $300 million to $400 million in Anthropic.
In August of this year, SK Telecom (SKT), the largest telecommunications operator in South Korea, announced that it would invest an additional $100 million in Aerospace to enhance its competitiveness in emerging technology fields and further develop various artificial intelligence services for the global market.