Amazon has announced its plans to invest up to $25 billion in artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, expanding its partnership to build out AI infrastructure. According to a report by CNBC, the deal includes an immediate $5 billion investment, with up $20 billion more tied to commercial milestones. This comes on top of the $8 billion which Amazon has already invested in Anthropic in recent years. As part of the agreement, Anthropic said that it will spend more than $100 billion on Amazon Web Services (AWS) technologies over the next decade. This also includes the present and future generations of Trainium, Amazon’s custom AI chips. Anthropic has secured up to 5 gigawatts of capacity for training and deploying its Claude AI models, with nearly 1 gigawatt of Trainium2 and Trainium3 capacity expected to come online by the end of the year.Amazon CEO Andy Jassy highlighted the significance of the partnership: “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 plans to spend $200 billion on AI
The investment announced by Amazon underscores the race among the major cloud providers to expand AI capacity. In February this year, Amazon said that it expects to spend around $200 billion this year on capital expenditures, mostly on AI infrastructure. The deal comes just two months after Amazon agreed to invest up to $50 billion in OpenAI, Anthropic’s chief rival.OpenAI executives have criticized Anthropic for not securing enough compute capacity, but Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said demand for Claude has surged, straining infrastructure. “Our users tell us Claude is increasingly essential to how they work, and we need to build the infrastructure to keep pace with rapidly growing demand,” Amodei said.
Anthropic’s growth
Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers, Anthropic has quickly become a leading AI company, best known for its Claude family of models. The company has found success with enterprise customers and reported annualised revenue topping $30 billion.Anthropic named AWS its primary cloud provider in 2023 and its primary training partner in 2024, though it has also signed deals with Microsoft, Google, and Broadcom for additional compute capacity. Microsoft previously committed up to $5 billion, while Anthropic pledged $30 billion in Azure usage.