11:52 AM EST, 11/22/2024 (MT Newswires) -- Amazon.com ( AMZN ) will invest another $4 billion in Anthropic as part of their expanded partnership, bringing the e-commerce giant's total committed investment in the artificial intelligence startup to $8 billion, the companies said Friday.

In September last year, Amazon ( AMZN ) said that it would invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic and that Amazon Web Services would become the startup's primary cloud provider.

Anthropic has selected AWS as its primary training partner and will use the AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its new foundation models, Amazon ( AMZN ) said Friday. Amazon ( AMZN ) will maintain its position as a minority investor in Anthropic, the latter said in a separate Friday statement.

The expanded collaboration will help improve the performance, security and privacy Amazon Bedrock provides for customers running Claude models, Amazon ( AMZN ) said. Claude is an AI assistant developed by Anthropic, while the Amazon Bedrock service helps build and scale generative AI applications with foundation models.

The Claude 3 and 3.5 model families are both available in Amazon Bedrock. Amazon ( AMZN ) said "tens of thousands" of customers are running their generative AI workloads using Anthropic's models in the AWS cloud.

"The response from AWS customers who are developing generative AI applications powered by Anthropic in Amazon Bedrock has been remarkable," AWS Chief Executive Matt Garman said.

Separately, Anthropic said it is working with AWS' Annapurna Labs on the development and optimization of next generations of Trainium accelerators.

Last year, Alphabet's (GOOG, GOOGL) Google ( GOOG ) agreed to invest as much as $2 billion in OpenAI rival Anthropic, The Wall Street Journal reported at the time, citing unnamed sources.

Late last month, Amazon ( AMZN ) logged third-quarter results that surpassed Wall Street's estimates amid double-digit revenue gains for AWS and its advertising business.

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