Dive Brief:
- Amazon will invest $25 billion in Anthropic over the next several years to secure more compute power, the tech giant announced Monday. The two companies’ updated deal includes a $5 billion investment now, with up to $20 billion of additional funding in the future tied to “certain commercial milestones,” Amazon said in the announcement.
- Anthropic said it’s committed to spending more than $100 billion on AWS technologies in the next 10 years, adding five gigawatts of capacity to further develop its models through the partnership.
- AWS customers will now have access to Anthropic’s Claude platform, and will be able to use AWS’ access controls and monitoring with the AI model. It’s a move that offers built-in guardrails to AWS customers who may have been wanting to use Claude, Gartner Distinguished VP Analyst Jason Wong said.
Dive Insight:
Amazon is doubling down on its relationship with AI provider Anthropic, following $8 billion in previous investments. The move shores up infrastructure that Anthropic and other AI providers are lacking as they try to scale, and gives AWS an exclusive way to offer Claude’s enterprise tools on its cloud platform.
"Anthropic's commitment to run its large language models on AWS Trainium for the next decade reflects the progress we've made together on custom silicon, as we continue delivering the technology and infrastructure our customers need to build with generative AI,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a statement.
The tech giant struck a similar partnership with OpenAI earlier this year to become the exclusive cloud distributor of OpenAI Frontier, an enterprise platform for building and deploying AI agents.
Working with two leading frontier labs indicates that Amazon and AWS are taking an aggressive approach in its position of providing AI infrastructure, Wong said. Everything in the infrastructure layer — chips, networking and availability — affects performance.
“Certainly being offline and down would be a significant impact on a lot of businesses that are now running these agents for critical business processes,” Wong said.
The deal shows confidence from Amazon in their chips for training, inference and their ability to run a global network. “It shows that Amazon is playing to its core cloud strength,” Wong said.
The deal follows AWS’ focus on its marketplace investments over the last few years, which allows their partners, SaaS providers and systems integrators to provide what AWS customers want with less friction.
For enterprise tech leaders, the Anthropic deal provides a way to streamline the procurement for AWS customers who want to use Claude, Wong said. It also allows them to inherit guardrails, data controls and regional availability that they signed up for with AWS.
“For AWS this gives them a little bit of exclusivity right now," Wong said. "No other hyperscaler can offer the cloud platform in such a way.”
