Amazon is doubling 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 committed last year. Although Amazon remains a minority investor, Anthropic has agreed to make Amazon Web Services (AWS) its “primary cloud and training partner.”
Before today’s announcement, The Information had that Amazon wanted to make any additional funding contingent on a commitment from Anthropic to use the company’s in-house AI chips instead of silicon from NVIDIA. It appears Amazon got its way, with both companies noting in separate press releases that Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train future foundation models.
Additionally, Anthropic says it will collaborate with Amazon’s Annapurna Labs to develop future Trainium accelerators. “Through deep technical collaboration, we’re writing low-level kernels that allow us to directly interface with the Trainium silicon, and contributing to the AWS Neuron software stack to strengthen Trainium,” the company said. “Our engineers work closely with Annapurna’s chip design team to extract maximum computational efficiency from the hardware, which we plan to leverage to train our most advanced foundation models.”
According to another , Anthropic expects to burn through more than $2.7 billion before the end. Before today, the company had raised $9.7 billion. Either way, it’s bought itself some much-needed runway as it looks to compete against OpenAI and other companies in the AI space.
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