Amazon is deepening its bet on Anthropic, committing another $5 billion to the AI startup in a deal that tightens their business ties across cloud computing and chips. The new investment, announced Monday, is part of a broader deal that could bring Amazon's total outlay to as much as $25 billion if certain performance goals are met, the Wall Street Journal reports. In return, Anthropic has agreed to buy more than $100 billion in cloud services from Amazon Web Services over time and will use 5 gigawatts of Amazon's AI chip capacity, including its Trainium hardware.
With Anthropic and OpenAI moving toward anticipated public offerings, and with the big hyperscalers competing to build out AI capacity as quickly as possible, the two are trying to show investors they're in the stronger position. OpenAI already has criticized Anthropic for failing to "acquire enough compute," CNBC points out. Amazon, which first invested $4 billion in Anthropic in 2023, has said it plans to spend about $200 billion this year on capital expenditures, much of it related to AI, an amount analysts have questioned.
The deal also aims to ease the capacity strain on Anthropic, whose Claude AI systems have faced outages, throttling, and slower performance during surging usage, prompting some customers to defect to competitors, per the Journal. "We need to build the infrastructure to keep pace with rapidly growing demand," Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in a statement.
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