Amazon has leased a million AI chips to Anthropic. What does this mean for the company?
E-commerce leader and cloud service provider Amazon said that startup Anthropic plans to use 1 million of its custom AI chips by the end of 2025.
Now Anthropic is already leasing 500k specialized Amazon Trainium2 AI chips to run Claude's models as part of Project Rainier, a large-scale AI cluster spanning data centers in Mississippi and Indiana. Such clusters combine thousands of specialized chips on servers and sometimes between data centers so they can work as a single system to train and run AI models.
Amazon says Anthropic's AI models are scaling to more than 1 million Trainium2 chips from Amazon this year, hosted both at Project Rainier and in the company's other data centers.
Amazon also announced that Project Rainier, one of the largest AI clusters in the world, is now fully operational. It's been less than a year since the cluster was announced in December 2024. The company says it will continue to scale its cloud service.
Why it's important
Amazon will release its quarterly earnings on Thursday, with investors keeping a close eye on the company's massive investment in AI amid massive white-collar layoffs.
The news from Amazon on the eve of publishing its accounts comes amid intensifying competition in the AI processor industry for cloud computing, writes Yahoo Finance. Last week, startup Anthropic announced that it would use 1 million of Google's custom AI chips, TPUs (Tensor Processing Units), in a deal worth billions of dollars. This raised questions about the prospects of Anthropic's partnership with Amazon. Therefore, the doubling of its AWS cloud service lease confirms that the startup has no plans to wind down its partnership with the service.
"This is a big deal for Amazon because there is a perception and concern in the market that it doesn't have the same infrastructure advantage in AI as Google," Hedgeye Risk Management analyst Andrew Friedman told Yahoo Finance. He added that the partnership is likely to provide AWS with annual multi-billion dollar revenue.
Meanwhile, Amazon and Google's expanding partnerships with AI developers are increasing pressure on chipmaker Nvidia, which has a large share of the AI chip market. Major cloud providers, including Amazon and Google, are increasingly developing their own chips, reducing their dependence on Nvidia.
"Today, most customers start with Nvidia when thinking about AI," Dave Brown, vice president of computing and machine learning at Amazon Web Services, explained in an interview with Yahoo Finance. - But the number of alternatives is growing, and Trainium is one of them. It's important that customers have a choice."
Amazon has invested $8 billion in Anthropic since 2023, and the startup uses the company's chips to train and run its Claude AI models. There is growing concern on Wall Street about "round-robin deals" between the biggest players in AI, with infrastructure providers such as Amazon and Nvidia investing in customers who then buy their own hardware and services. This has fueled fears that demand for AI may be overvalued and heightened fears of a looming bubble, Yahoo Finance explains.
This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor
