San Francisco-based Anthropic is adding to its already considerable war chest of funding thanks to Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) as it seeks to build competing AI model and chatbot to OpenAI's ChatGPT.
Amazon said it would invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic as part of a strategic partnership that will give the e-commerce giant a minority stake in the AI startup. The initial investment will be $1.5 billion.
As part of the deal, Anthropic will use Amazon Web Services as its primary cloud provider and use Amazon's proprietary chips to power its AI models. Training and running these types of models is extremely expensive and compute-intensive process, which has led to a slew of megadeals between tech giants and rising AI startups.
Earlier this year Microsoft agreed to invest $13 billion in rival OpenAI, which uses its data centers to power its models. Anthropic struck a seemingly conflicting deal earlier with Google, where Google invested $300 million in Anthropic, who at the time announced that Google Cloud would be its primary cloud provider. That partnership, Anthropic said, remained unchanged.
“We are excited to use AWS’s Trainium chips to develop future foundation models,” said Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic in a statement, adding that the company had seen "significant organic adoption from AWS customers" since adding support for Amazon Bedrock, a service for running AI models, to its Claude virtual assistant.
"By significantly expanding our partnership, we can unlock new possibilities for organizations of all sizes, as they deploy Anthropic’s safe, state-of-the-art AI systems together with AWS’s leading cloud technology," Amodei also said in the statement.
Anthropic will also provide AWS customers with early access to features that allows users to customize and fine-tune its AI models.
The deal marks a major move by Amazon into the generative AI race, an area where it was perceived as falling behind in as it until now lacked any major products or partnerships in the space.
As for Anthropic, the major influx of funding will likely mean major expansions with possible local impact. Before the recent deal with Amazon, the startup had raised $1.25 billion and employed about 200 people.
OpenAI is reportedly seeking to expand its real estate footprint after its major funding deal with Microsoft and upgrade from its current humble occupancy in the Mission District.
Anthropic currently leases over 17,000 square feet in Jackson Square, and is now moving to sublease Slack's former 230,000-square-foot headquarters at 500 Howard.
Given the flagging local commercial real estate market, landlords and brokers are putting their hopes for renewal in well-funded AI companies like Anthropic expanding locally.
