• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, March 28, 2024

Amazon has increased its investment in Anthropic, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup focused on building systems, adding an additional $2.75 billion in funding. This brings the company’s total financial infusion to $4 billion.

The funds give Amazon a minority ownership position in the company. The initial collaboration was announced in September 2023.

New Street Research estimates that generative AI (GAI) will represent 21% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) revenue in 2025. The analyst firm compared GAI with non-GAI revenue.

After breaking out GAI revenue, New Street Research estimates GAI revenue will amount to $18.2 billion in 2024 and $26.9 billion in 2025, for a total of $45.1 billion during the next two years.

During the past year, Anthropic closed five funding deals worth about $7.3 billion. The company's product competes with OpenAI's ChatGPT in enterprise and consumer markets. A former OpenAI research executive founded the company.

Amazon's investment comes weeks after Anthropic debuted Claude 3, which it refers to as its most powerful chatbot and suite of AI models.

Claude 3 is available on Amazon Bedrock, which is the first managed service to offer Sonnet and Haiku in general availability, with Opus coming soon. The availability is part of the Amazon's and Anthropic's strategic collaboration.

Amazon Bedrock supports a choice of high-performing foundation models from leading AI companies like AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Mistral AI, Stability AI, and Amazon via a single API, along with a set of capabilities companies use to build generative AI applications with security, privacy, and responsible AI.

Google also backs Anthropic. Google Cloud made the Claude models available in Vertex AI Model Garden, a collection of pre-trained machine-learning models and tools. 

Similar to Google and Microsoft, Amazon continues to integration GAI across all parts of its business.

And despite Google's agreement with Anthropic to host its models in Google Cloud, as part of the collaborative agreement with Amazon, Anthropic uses AWS as its primary cloud provider for workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development.

Microsoft has been making its own investments in AI companies other than OpenAI. The Financial Times reports Microsoft invested in European AI startup Mistral and last week struck a $650 million deal to hire the leadership team and researchers from AI company Inflection, according to a person with knowledge of the deal.