Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN) is diving into the artificial intelligence (AI) landscape with a US$4 billion investment in AI firm Anthropic in order to acquire a minority ownership stake in the machine learning organisation.
The deal highlights Amazon's growing focus on AI and its determination to stay competitive against industry giants like Microsoft and Google. Amazon’s web services division will also be used to provide Anthropic with cloud storage.
Anthropic, founded around two years ago by former OpenAI research executives, recently unveiled its AI chatbot called Claude 2 which is aimed at rivalling ChatGPT.
In addition to the investment and collaboration, customers of Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company’s cloud division, will gain early access to exclusive features for model customization and fine-tuning capabilities offered by Anthropic.
Furthermore, Anthropic will utilize custom AWS-designed semiconductors for training its foundational AI models, using the technology to serve as the bedrock for various AI applications and to help with the adaptability for a wide range of tasks.
NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA), known for its graphics processing units (GPUs) used in training large AI models, has seen significant gains due to the surge in generative AI technologies and OpenAI has received billions in funding from giants like Microsoft following the release of its chatbot.
Other shareholders in Anthropic, which include Google’s Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG), Spark Capital, Salesforce.com, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) and Zoom Video Communications Inc (NASDAQ:ZM), have reportedly invested a total of US$2.7 billion to date, with Google Cloud having bought 10% of Anthropic for US$300 million back in February.
Amazon shares were flat in pre-market trading in the US, having closed at a little over US$129.