Amazon Makes a Shrewd Move in the AI Arms Race
The startup Anthropic will use the company’s computer chips, positioning them as a viable competitor to those made by Nvidia.
Amazon is leaning on Anthropic’s work around trust and safety.
Photographer: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg
Ever since Microsoft Corp. put $10 billion in OpenAI in January and began integrating ChatGPT into its products, people have been watching closely to see how its biggest tech rivals would respond. Google scrambled to release its chatbot, Bard. Meta Platforms Inc. launched its own large language model, LLaMA. On Monday, Amazon.com Inc. made a move it hopes can turn around the perception it had fallen behind in the AI arms race.
Its $1.25 billion investment in San Francisco-based Anthropic, which could grow to $4 billion and includes a minority stake, is something of a coup for Amazon and its cloud division, Amazon Web Services. Anthropic’s decision to make AWS its “primary cloud provider” for “mission critical workloads” comes just seven months after the startup’s cloud deal with Alphabet Inc.’s Google, which had been an early investor.