Amazon has doubled its investment in the AI startup Anthropic by $4 billion to a total of $8 billion.

The partnership with Anthropic, known for its AI chatbot Claude, highlights the significance of such alliances between AI startups and hyperscalers. Alongside Amazon, Microsoft and Google have also made similar agreements: Microsoft invested more than 13 billion USD in OpenAI, while Google collaborates with Cohere.

Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, stated that Claude experienced "a year of breakthrough." The collaboration with Amazon significantly contributed to making the AI's capabilities accessible to "millions of end-users and tens of thousands of customers.

Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI researchers, was recently valued at 18 billion USD. However, it lags behind its competitors OpenAI (150 billion USD) and Elon Musk's xAI (45 billion USD).

The latest investment strengthens the technical partnership with Amazon's cloud and chip products, while Anthropic remains open to collaborations with other companies like Google or Nvidia. Amazon also plans to integrate the Claude models into the next generation of its Alexa devices to enhance their AI capabilities.

In the context of growing investments, the capital expenditures of the major hyperscalers Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Google rose by 62 percent to approximately 60 billion USD in the last quarter. Amazon and Meta signaled that investments in AI infrastructures will continue to increase next year.

Despite the massive cash injections, regulatory scrutiny is growing in the US, UK, and the EU, as such deals could be viewed as potentially anti-competitive. The UK Competition Authority recently reviewed the partnership between Google and Anthropic but did not launch further investigations.