Amazon to invest an additional US$5 billion in Anthropic

Anthropic, founded in 2021 by several former employees of OpenAI, is widely expected to conduct an initial public offering as soon as this year. The AI company has been racing to persuade more businesses to pay for its software to help offset the immense cost of developing the technology.

The agreement is the latest sign of Anthropic's hunger for the immense processing power necessary to build new versions of Claude. Like OpenAI, Anthropic has inked a series of deals to secure the necessary chips and rented computing power. Anthropic last week said it would enlist Broadcom Inc. to supply chips based on Google's tensor processing units, a rival to Amazon's Trainium line. The collaboration among the three companies will let Anthropic access about 3.5 gigawatts' worth of computing power. Anthropic in October confirmed it would grab as many as 1 million of the specialized AI chips from the Alphabet Inc. unit, a tie-up worth tens of billions of dollars.