Amazon to invest up to $25 billion in Anthropic as part of $100 billion cloud deal

Amazon said on Monday that it will invest up to $25 billion in Anthropic, as the AI startup commits to spending more than $100 billion over the next 10 years on Amazon's cloud technologies.

The deal deepens the two firms' relationship as Anthropic rushes to secure capacity ⁠to bolster its models.

Seattle-based Amazon will invest $5 billion in Anthropic now, and an additional $20 billion in the future, subject to certain commercial milestones. This is in addition to the $8 billion Amazon previously invested in the company.

Amazon has struggled ⁠to generate buzz around its own AI models, such as Nova, while continuing to be a leader in providing critical infrastructure for the AI boom, such as cloud computing power. Amazon said it anticipates around $200 billion this year on capital expenditures, largely for AI development. Amazon is also making big bets on the largest AI startups. The new investment in ⁠Anthropic, the creator ⁠of Claude, follows Amazon's announcement earlier this year it would invest up to $50 billion ⁠in OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. In a statement, Anthropic said it expected to bring roughly 1 gigawatt of capacity via Trainium2 and Trainium3 chips by year-end. Anthropic ultimately expects to secure up to 5 gigawatts of such capacity. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a statement that Anthropic's use of Trainium chips "reflects the progress we've made together on custom silicon."

Anthropic ⁠is aiming to pull ahead in the AI race with model releases focusing on coding and design, while Amazon seeks customers for ⁠its custom silicon chips built for artificial intelligence training and inference.

Amazon shares rose around 2.7% in extended trading.