Amazon is reportedly in talks to pump billions of dollars more into AI start-up Anthropic, but with one condition

Amazon is reportedly in talks to make another huge financial investment in AI start-up Anthropic, which could potentially attract regulatory scrutiny once again.

The Information reported (citing a person familiar with the matter), that Amazon is in talks to invest multiple billions of dollars in Anthropic, and the investment would structured similar to its previous investments, but with one condition.

The condition is that Amazon wants Anthropic to use Amazon-developed silicon hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to train its AI.

AI silicon

Anthropic however reportedly prefers Nvidia chips, but it is no secret that Amazon is hard at work developing faster AI chips that are cheaper than Nvidia’s offerings.

In July for example engineers at Amazon.com’s chip lab in Austin, Texas, reportedly put a closely guarded new server design through its paces.

And the firm already has suitable silicon. It should be remembered that in November 2023 at its AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, Amazon had announced the next generation of two AWS-designed chip families – AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2.

Other big name tech firms including Meta, Microsoft, and Google, have also developed or are upgrading their own inhouse AI chips.

Anthropic investment

Amazon has already made notable investments in Anthropic.

In September 2023 Amazon made an initial investment of $1.25 billion in Anthropic, but also stated it had plans to invest up to $4 billion.

Then in March 2024 Amazon pumped an additional $2.75 billion into the San Francisco-based Anthropic, completing its $4 billion investment.

Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives, including siblings Daniela and Dario Amodei, Anthropic in January 2024 had released a limited test of a chatbot named Claude that offers features similar to ChatGPT.

In April 2024 the British competition regulator, the CMA, announced it had expanded its investigation into the AI sector and its key players, and began seeking feedback on the partnerships between Microsoft and Mistral AI, as well as Amazon and Anthropic.

Then in August the CMA began an investigation into Amazon’s funding of Anthropic, amidst wider concern that a small number of tech companies were controlling the emerging generative AI field.

But a month later in September 2024, the CMA cleared Amazon’s $4bn investment into Anthropic, saying it did not meet threshold for in-depth review under merger regulations.

But now according to the Information, Amazon is in talks to funnel more billions of dollars into Anthropic.

The AI start up has reportedly been discussing new funding at a $40 billion valuation for months now.

To date, Anthropic has raised a total of $9.7 billion.

This is half of OpenAI’s $21.9 billion total investment. OpenAI’s biggest investor is of course Microsoft (up to $13 billion).