Amazon is considering increasing its investment in OpenAI rival Anthropic.
According to The Information, Amazon is in talks to invest multiple billions in Anthropic, its first financial pledge in the company since a $4 billion deal struck last year. The new investment is structured similar to the last one — but with a twist. Amazon wants Anthropic to use Amazon-developed silicon hosted on Amazon Web Services to train its AI.
Anthropic prefers Nvidia chips. But the money may be too good to pass up. Around the start of the year, Anthropic reportedly projected it would burn through over $2.7 billion in 2024 as it trained and scaled up its AI products. Anthropic has for several months been discussing new funding at a $40 billion valuation, per The Information, and no doubt the pressure is on to clinch something soon.
To date, Anthropic has raised $9.7 billion — close to half of OpenAI’s $21.9 billion haul.
(Above, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.)