Amazon Invests $4 Billion in OpenAI Competitor 'Anthropic'

Securing Partners to Strengthen Competitiveness in AI Business

Amazon, the world's largest cloud service provider, is investing up to $4 billion in Anthropic to strengthen its competitiveness in the artificial intelligence (AI) business. Anthropic is an AI startup considered a competitor to OpenAI, the developer of the generative AI ChatGPT.

According to foreign media such as the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and Reuters on the 25th (local time), Amazon is making an initial investment of $1.25 billion in Anthropic and may increase the investment up to $4 billion in the future based on certain conditions. Through this investment, Amazon will hold a minority stake in Anthropic, although the exact share ratio has not been disclosed.

Anthropic is a startup based in San Francisco, USA, founded by former OpenAI members. It is regarded as a leading company in the generative AI field alongside OpenAI. The company highlights its business differentiation by training its AI to uphold moral values, showcased through its 'Claude' chatbot.

[Image source=Reuters Yonhap News]

Amazon plans to secure access to Anthropic's AI technology and utilize it across its business operations. The company explained that Amazon Web Services (AWS) engineers will use Anthropic's AI models. If the investment amount increases to $4 billion, it could become the largest deal related to AWS.

Through this agreement, Anthropic will be able to use Amazon's cloud computing infrastructure. It plans to move the software used for AI development to AWS data centers and utilize AWS's proprietary AI chips, 'Trainium' and 'Inferentia,' to train AI models. This is a case where Nvidia chips, which have been widely used in the industry, will not be used.

Foreign media analyzed that Amazon has made a large-scale investment and secured a partner to strengthen its competitiveness in the AI field. Although Amazon ranks first in the cloud computing market, it is considered to be lagging behind big tech companies such as Microsoft (MS) and Google in the AI sector.