Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

Anthropic announced on Monday that Amazon has agreed to invest a fresh $5 billion, bringing Amazon’s total investment in the company to $13 billion. Anthropic, for its part, has agreed to spend over $100 billion on AWS over the next 10 years, obtaining up to 5 GW of new computing capacity to train and run Claude.The deal echoes an agreement Amazon struck with OpenAI just two months ago, when it joined a $110 billion funding round — contributing $50 billion — that valued the ChatGPT maker at a $730 billion pre-money valuation. That deal, too, was structured partly as cloud infrastructure services rather than straight cash.At the heart of this deal is Amazon’s custom chips: Graviton (a low-power CPU) and Trainium (an Nvidia competitor and AI accelerator chip). The Anthropic deal specifically covers Trainium2 through Trainium4 chips, even though Trainium4 chips are not currently available. The latest chip, Trainium3, was released in December. On top of that, Anthropic has secured the option to buy capacity on future Amazon chips as they become available.We’ll see if this news is a teaser to Anthropic announcing a new funding round. VCs have reportedly been offering the AI company capital in a deal that would value it at $800 billion or more.