Anthropic secured another investment from Amazon, named AWS its primary training partner
Anthropic announced this week an expansion of its partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), including a new $4 billion investment Amazon made in the startup. The new investment brings the total amount Anthropic has received from Amazon to $8 billion. Notably, Amazon's position as a minority stakeholder on Anthropic remains unchanged, although Anthropic has named AWS its primary cloud and training partner.
Regarding the latter, Anthropic also shared it has been working closely with AWS's Annapurna Labs to develop and optimize the next generations of Trainium accelerators. When it announced the Build on Trainium grant program, AWS highlighted that its new Neuron Kernel Interface allows researchers to access the chip’s instruction-set directly so they can build optimized compute kernels for performance enhancements or to support new model operations.
In a similar vein, Anthropic stated that it is writing its own low-level kernels to interact directly with AWS's silicon, and more generally, that it is contributing to the AWS Neuron software stack and working closely with Annapurna's chip design team to ensure it can take advantage of every last bit of performance once it starts training its most advanced models.
Looking at the fruits of its partnership with AWS thus far, Anthropic notes that its Claude foundation model family has become a core infrastructure solution through Amazon Bedrock, empowering thousands of companies with reliable AI capabilities. Notable use cases include Pfizer accelerating medical research, Intuit simplifying tax calculations, and Perplexity enhancing search engine accuracy.
These are all consumer solutions, but Anthropic also notes that customers with specific security and privacy requirement, such as government customers and industry partners, can access Claude through the AWS GovCloud (US). Government customers can also access Claude on Amazon SageMaker through highly controlled environments like the AWS Secret and Top Secret Cloud Regions.
Anthropic expects this expanded partnership with AWS to yield world-class enterprise AI solutions which are accessible and performant thanks to the combination of AWS's exceptional infrastructure and Anthropic's frontier Ai research and development.