Amazon has agreed to invest as much as $25 billion more in Anthropic, the artificial intelligence start-up that created the Claude chatbot, the companies said on Monday, the latest in a series of massive deals between tech giants and A.I. start-ups.
Amazon, which previously invested $8 billion in Anthropic, is already one of the start-up’s largest investors. In the latest deal, Amazon plans to invest $5 billion to start, with the potential to add another $20 billion if Anthropic hits certain milestones.
Anthropic, in turn, committed to spend $100 billion on computing power and other services from Amazon’s cloud computing business over the next decade. The start-up will also continue to use specialized computer chips that Amazon has designed as an alternative to high-priced chips from Nvidia, the Silicon Valley chipmaker that dominates the A.I. market.
The largest tech companies are continuing to pour billions of dollars into A.I. despite worries by some investors that the costs are too high. Over the past few years, spending on A.I. has climbed to record heights, raising questions about whether the boom can be sustained.
The agreements between Amazon and Anthropic are also the latest example of the circular deal making at the heart of the A.I. surge. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Nvidia have invested huge sums in companies like Anthropic and OpenAI. In exchange, these start-ups purchase massive amounts of computing power from the same investors.
Amazon and Anthropic are betting that they can deliver leading A.I. technologies using alternatives to Nvidia’s powerful but expensive chips. Over the past year, Anthropic has become one of the largest users of Amazon’s latest chip, known as Trainium.
“Our users tell us Claude is increasingly essential to how they work, and we need to build the infrastructure to keep pace with rapidly growing demand,” Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, said in a statement.
Andy Jassy, Amazon’s chief executive, said in a statement that Anthropic’s bet to run its models on Amazon’s chips over the next decade “reflects the progress we’ve made together on custom silicon.”
In February, Anthropic completed a funding round that brought $30 billion into its coffers, valuing the young company at $380 billion, which was more than double its valuation from the previous September. The new deal with Amazon does not affect Anthropic’s valuation.
Amazon in February also said it was investing $50 billion in OpenAI, the start-up behind ChatGPT that has said it would spend more than $100 billion on Amazon’s services.
Amazon has told investors that it expects to spend $200 billion this year on capital expenditures, primarily to build data centers and fill them with chips used to power A.I.
Mr. Jassy wrote in a shareholder letter earlier this month that the investments were not made “on a hunch,” but reflected commitments from OpenAI and other unannounced deals.
(The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023 for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)
Cade Metz is a Times reporter who writes about artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality and other emerging areas of technology.
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