Dive Brief:
- Amazon paid the last installment of its $4 billion investment in AI startup Anthropic Wednesday. The tech giant made an initial investment of $1.25 billion in September and paid $2.75 billion this week to cement a minority ownership position in the company.
- Earlier this month, AWS expanded access to Anthropic’s Claude 3 models via Amazon Bedrock. Anthropic uses AWS as its primary cloud provider for mission-critical workloads and AWS Tranium and Inferentia chips to build, train and deploy its future models as part of the partnership as well, the companies said.
- “Generative AI is poised to be the most transformational technology of our time, and we believe our strategic collaboration with Anthropic will further improve our customers’ experiences, and look forward to what’s next,” Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of data and AI at AWS, said in the announcement.
Dive Insight:
Deals between hyperscalers and generative AI providers can have a direct impact on enterprise efforts as organizations look to leverage these new capabilities in the cloud.
AWS has emphasized its position as a provider of AI’s foundational infrastructure, a nod to its Bedrock moniker. The hyperscaler is also stepping up to help enterprises overcome generative AI adoption challenges.
“Clients are coming to grips with the investments needed to truly implement AI across the enterprise and nearly all are finding it difficult to scale, because the AI technology is a small part of what is needed,” Accenture Chair and CEO Julie Sweet said during a Q2 2024 earnings call last week.
Accenture partnered with Anthropic and AWS to help enterprises navigate implementation challenges earlier this month. More than 1,400 Accenture engineers will receive specialist training in using Anthropic’s models on AWS, the companies announced last week. Accenture engineers will then use those skills to assist customers in accelerating their AI strategies.
Despite the close partnership, Claude 3 models aren’t exclusive to AWS. Organizations can also access the Anthropic models on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI.
