Amazon announced on Wednesday that it will be investing an additional $2.75 billion into Anthropic, an artificial intelligence startup based in San Francisco. This brings Amazon's total investment in Anthropic to $4 billion, with the Seattle-based tech giant maintaining a minority stake in the company. Anthropic is a competitor of OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.

Swami Sivasubramanian, the vice president of data and AI at AWS, Amazon's cloud computing subsidiary, stated that "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." Amazon initially invested $1.25 billion in Anthropic in September, with plans to invest up to $4 billion.

The collaboration between Amazon and Anthropic will focus on developing foundation models that are crucial for generative AI systems. Anthropic will be using AWS as its primary cloud provider and Amazon's custom chips to build, train, and deploy AI models. Additionally, Anthropic will provide AWS customers, mainly businesses, access to models through an Amazon service called Bedrock. Companies like Delta Air Lines and Siemens are already utilizing Bedrock to access Anthropic's AI models.

This investment by Amazon is part of a larger trend where Big Tech companies are investing in artificial intelligence startups. However, this trend has caught the attention of U.S. antitrust regulators who have expressed concerns over these investments.