Amazon doubles its investment in generative AI development start-up Anthropic. What is the background to strengthening its position as a cloud giant and aiming to become a leader in the generative AI competition?
🟦 Amazon invests 1.2 trillion yen in AI startups! What is the strategy to aim for the top in the generative AI competition?
Amazon has newly invested $ 4 billion (about 600 billion yen) in Anthropic, which handles generative AI development, and doubled the cumulative investment amount to $ 8 billion (about 1.2 trillion yen). The move further solidifies the company’s position as the world’s largest cloud platform player amid increasing competition in the generative AI market.
Anthropic is a start-up developing generative AI “Claude” that was founded in 2021 by members who were independent from OpenAI. The company’s technology offers conversational AI similar to ChatGPT, but with a greater focus on safety. Amazon is trying to make its AI services more competitive by bringing this technology to its cloud customers. In addition, Anthropic is involved in the improvement of its in-house developed AI semiconductor “Trainium”, proposing a cost-effective option to compete with Nvidia’s products.
🟦 What is the background to Amazon’s generative AI enhancement?
The reason for Amazon’s focus on generative AI is to maintain its dominance in the cloud services market while catching up in the AI development race. Currently, Amazon boasts the top share of the cloud market, but it has been pointed out that it is lagging behind Microsoft and Google in the in-house development of generative AI technology. For this reason, strengthening our partnership with Anthropic is very important as a means of quickly incorporating existing generative AI technologies.
In addition, in order to improve the performance of generative AI, enormous computing resources are required, and cloud services are indispensable as the foundation for this. Amazon is leveraging its leadership in this space to make it easier for cloud customers to take advantage of Anthropic’s AI.
🟦 Summary
Amazon’s $8 billion investment in Anthropic and focus on the development of generative AI technology is driven by the strategic aim of maintaining its leadership in the cloud market and making up for the lag in generative AI technology. As a result, it is expected to further enhance the value provided to customers while utilizing Anthropic’s technology.
