Amazon deepens AI partnership with Anthropic with $5B investment

Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN) has announced a $5 billion investment in AI company Anthropic, alongside plans for up to an additional $20 billion in future funding tied to commercial milestones.

The funding builds on an earlier investment of approximately $8 billion and is part of a broader deepening of the companies' strategic partnership focused on large-scale artificial intelligence development and infrastructure.

Alongside the investment, Anthropic will expand its use of Amazon's cloud and custom AI hardware, including access to up to 5 gigawatts of capacity based on current and next-generation Trainium chips. The chips are designed by Amazon specifically for high-performance AI training and inference workloads.

The agreement also includes broader use of Amazon's Graviton processors, which are widely deployed across cloud computing applications.

Anthropic's Claude AI models will continue to be available through Amazon Web Services (AWS), including via Amazon Bedrock, Amazon's managed service that provides access to foundation models. According to the companies, more than 100,000 customers already use Claude models through AWS, making it one of the most widely adopted model families on the platform.

As part of the expanded collaboration, Anthropic will also integrate its Claude developer experience more directly into AWS, allowing customers to access Claude tools using their existing AWS accounts and infrastructure controls. This is intended to simplify deployment by eliminating the need for separate credentials or billing arrangements.

The companies also highlighted ongoing joint infrastructure efforts, including "Project Rainier," a large-scale AI compute cluster built with nearly half a million Trainium2 chips. The system is being used to train and deploy Claude models and is expected to support future iterations as demand for generative AI increases.

Anthropic has separately committed to spending more than $100 billion over the next decade on AWS infrastructure, including current and future generations of Trainium chips and large-scale CPU capacity. The companies also plan to expand international availability of AI inference services across regions including Europe and Asia.

Shares of Amazon traded up 1.3% at about $251 following the announcement.