Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

In a significant development, Anthropic has revealed that Amazon will be investing an additional $5 billion into the AI company. This latest injection boosts Amazon's total investment in Anthropic to an impressive $13 billion. In exchange for this financial backing, Anthropic has committed to spend over $100 billion on Amazon Web Services (AWS) over the next decade. This partnership will provide Anthropic with access to up to 5 gigawatts of new computing capacity, essential for training and deploying its AI model, Claude. This strategic deal mirrors a recent arrangement Amazon made with OpenAI, where it contributed $50 billion as part of a larger $110 billion funding round. That investment valued OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, at a staggering $730 billion prior to the funding. Central to this collaboration are Amazon's custom chips, including the Graviton low-power CPU and the Trainium AI accelerator, which is designed to compete with Nvidia's offerings. The agreement specifically pertains to the Trainium2 through Trainium4 chips, despite the fact that Trainium4 is not yet available on the market. The latest in this series, Trainium3, was launched in December. Furthermore, Anthropic has secured the right to purchase additional capacity as new Amazon chips are released. This announcement raises speculation about a potential new funding round for Anthropic, as venture capitalists are reportedly interested in investing, which could elevate the company’s valuation to $800 billion or more.