Amazon has increased its support for Anthropic, and it should come as no surprise.
Some critics expected the AI bubble to burst, but so far, the numbers suggest otherwise. AI companies keep raising billions at rising valuations.
Companies like Tinker, SSI, Anthropic, Cognition, and Multiverse Computing are all valued in the billions, even though none of them is more than a decade old.
On April 20, Anthropic announced it had secured a major funding round with Amazon. The deal saw Anthropic secure up to 5 gigawatts in compute to train and deploy Anthropic’s premier AI models on AWS infrastructure.
Specifically, Anthropic will leverage AWS Graviton and Trainium chips, which excel at efficient deep learning training.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said, “Our custom AI silicon offers high performance at significantly lower cost for customers, which is why it’s in such hot demand.”
The chips are Amazon’s custom-made silicon, an initiative that stems from 2015 when Amazon acquired Annapurna Labs for roughly $350 million. Annapurna Labs is involved in chip design, improvement, and engineering.
To reflect the capabilities of Amazon’s chips, Meta also, in the same week, announced a deal with AWS to utilize tens of millions of Graviton chips to train Meta AI and power agentic experiences on Meta platforms.
In addition, Amazon committed it would invest $5 billion in Anthropic to build on the $8 billion they already invested in the same company, with up to an additional $20 billion in the future.
Interestingly enough, in February this year OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT and close rivals to Anthropic, also closed a funding round with Amazon. The round raised $110B in investments from Amazon, NVIDIA, and Softbank at a $730B valuation.
NVIDIA and SoftBank committed $30 billion each. It had Amazon announcing an investment of $50 billion in OpenAI, starting with an initial $15 billion investment and followed by another $35 billion.
Google Commits $10 Billion to Anthropic
On April 24, barely five days after the Amazon announcement, Anthropic announced a new deal with Google for $10 billion in Anthropic at a $350B valuation.
In addition, the agreement could see the amount increase by up to a further $30 billion based on certain performance benchmarks. Keen to note is that Google had already invested roughly $300 million in Anthropic in the first half of 2023. In return, it received a stake of roughly 10% in the then upcoming startup.
This signals the potential of Anthropic’s AI models, as Google itself is a competitor. Google recently announced its latest Gemma 4 models, plus the company placed a big shift onto the agentic era in their recently concluded Google Cloud Next event.
Despite significant market shifts, the AI industry is still experiencing a boom in financial funding. Perhaps there is no bubble, or maybe the skeptics were a bit too early.
