Amazon invests $4bn more in Anthropic, becomes primary training partner

Amazon announced a further $4 billion investment in Anthropic, completing an $8 billion total commitment that began with an initial investment in September 2023. Anthropic named Amazon Web Services its primary cloud and training partner, and said it would train and deploy its future foundation models using AWS’s own Trainium and Inferentia chips, deepening a relationship the companies described as extending to joint work on Trainium’s hardware and software roadmap.

AWS chief executive Matt Garman said customer response to Anthropic-powered generative AI applications built through Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s managed model service, had been strong, and credited Anthropic’s pace of development. Anthropic co-founder and chief executive Dario Amodei called 2024 “a year of breakout growth for Claude” and said the AWS collaboration had been central to bringing Claude to a wide user base through Bedrock.

The deal reinforced a structural feature of the frontier AI industry by this point: labs without their own cloud infrastructure remained dependent on hyperscaler capital both to buy or build training compute and to reach enterprise customers, while cloud providers used those investments to secure a flagship AI tenant and, in AWS’s case, a large-scale customer to validate its own Trainium chips as a lower-cost alternative to Nvidia GPUs. Anthropic’s structure — including its Long Term Benefit Trust — was left unchanged by the additional capital, mirroring the governance commitments made alongside Amazon’s original 2023 investment.