Amazon has significantly boosted its multibillion-dollar bet on cloud developer Anthropic by investing an additional $5 billion – enabling Anthropic to ultimately secure up to 5 gigawatts of AI chips from Amazon to help train and run its popular cloud AI models.
Amazon is already one of Anthropic’s biggest investors, having previously invested $8 billion in the AI startup. The latest move brings Amazon’s immediate investment to $13 billion, and the companies have agreed to the possibility of Amazon investing an additional $20 billion in the future if the partnership achieves certain business milestones, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The prospect of a larger cash investment and acquisition of more computing resources comes at a critical time for Anthropic, given the huge surge in paid subscriptions for cloud-related services earlier this year. The increase in demand and stress on the existing cloud compute infrastructure that supports the cloud has contributed to performance problems and even occasional outages for thousands of cloud users.
“Growth at this pace places an unavoidable strain on our infrastructure; our unprecedented consumer growth has strained reliability and performance for free, Pro, Max, and Team users, particularly during peak hours,” Anthropic wrote in an announcement about the Amazon investment.
Anthropic said the new deal with Amazon would deliver “meaningful compute over the next three months” and about 1 gigawatt in total before the end of 2026. The company did not specify a timeline for when Anthropic could acquire the full 5 gigawatts of new compute capacity from Amazon.
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