Amazon is investing up to $25 billion in Anthropic’s AI infrastructure segment

Amazon has agreed to invest up to $25 billion in Anthropic, on top of $8 billion invested in artificial intelligence startups in recent years, as part of an expanded deal to build AI infrastructure.

In Monday’s announcement, Anthropic said it has committed to spending more than $100 billion on Amazon Web Services technology over the next 10 years, including current and future generations of Trainium, Amazon’s AI chips. Anthropic said it has secured up to 5 gigawatts of power to train and run its Claude AI models.

“Anthropic’s commitment to deploy large-scale language models on AWS Trainium over the next decade demonstrates the progress we’ve made together with custom silicon, as we continue to deliver the technology and infrastructure our customers need to build with productive AI,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a statement.

Amazon’s investment includes $5 billion in Anthropic now, with up to $20 billion in the future tied to “certain trading points,” according to the release. The initial investment is at Anthropic’s latest valuation of $380 billion.

Anthropic said in its release that it will bring about 1 gigawatt total of Trainium2 and Trainium3 capacity online by the end of the year.

With all the big hyperscalers competing to build AI capacity as quickly as possible, Amazon said in February that it expects to spend about $200 billion this year on capital expenditures, mostly on AI infrastructure.

Amazon’s investment comes just two months after the e-commerce giant agreed to invest up to $50 billion in OpenAI, Anthropic’s biggest rival. The two AI companies have been racing to convince investors of their strengthening positions ahead of potential IPOs that could come as soon as this year. OpenAI executives have been criticizing Anthropic in recent months for making “the wrong move of not getting enough compute.”

Anthropic said on Monday that Claude’s business and engineering demand, along with a “sharp increase” in consumer usage, had led to an “unavoidable stress” on its infrastructure that had impacted its reliability and performance. The company said its new deal with Amazon will rapidly increase its available capacity.

“Our users tell us that Claude is very important to the way they work, and we need to build the infrastructure to keep up with the rapidly growing demand,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in a statement. “Our partnership with Amazon will allow us to continue to advance AI research while bringing Claude to our customers, including more than 100,000 buildings on AWS.”

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by a group of researchers and executives who defected from OpenAI. The company is best known for its Claude AI family of models and has found early success selling to businesses. Annual revenue reached $30 billion.

Anthropic named AWS its primary cloud provider in 2023 and primary training partner in 2024, but the company has also entered into agreements with competing providers, including. Microsoft again Google.

In November, Microsoft agreed to invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic, and Anthropic said it has committed to buying $30 billion of Azure computing. Earlier this month, Anthropic expanded its partnership with Google once more Broadcom “many gigawatts” of capacity.

– CNBC’s Kate Rooney contributed to this report

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