On Friday, Anthropic announced that Amazon has increased its investment in the AI startup by $4 billion, bringing its total stake to $8 billion while maintaining its minority investor position. Anthropic makes Claude, an AI assistant rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
One reason behind the deal involves chips. The computing demands of training large AI models have made access to specialized processors a requirement for AI companies. While Nvidia currently dominates the AI chip market with customers that include most major tech companies, some cloud providers like Amazon have begun developing their own AI-specific processors.
Under the agreement, Anthropic will train and deploy its foundation models using Amazon’s custom-built Trainium (for training AI models) and its Inferentia chips (for AI inference, the term for running trained models). The company will also work with Amazon’s Annapurna Labs division to advance processor development for AI applications.