Amazon chased Anthropic for 2.75 billion dollars, and its market value skyrocketed by 500 billion!

  New Zhiyuan reports  

Editor: Run

Amazon invested an additional $2.75 billion in Anthropic, fulfilling its commitment to invest $4 billion at the end of last year. Don't spend billions or tens of billions of dollars to invest in a large-scale model unicorn, and be embarrassed to say that you are a big technology company?

When Amazon and Anthropic officially announced the $1.25 billion investment in October last year, it was clear that both parties could request that the total investment be expanded to $4 billion.

After an additional $2.75 billion in Anthropic, the investment became Amazon's largest single outside investment.

Amazon said the investment would not affect the Anthropic team's control of the company, and that Amazon remains a minority shareholder in the company and did not disclose the actual percentage of the company.

After missing OpenAI, Amazon can't miss Anthropic anymore!

Large model company + cloud service provider = market value hits a new high?

After Microsoft's more than $10 billion blessing to OpenAI, the stock price continued to rise, and in January this year, the market value successfully surpassed Apple, becoming the world's most valuable company.

In the following two months, Microsoft's market value continued to rise, while Apple's market value has been shrinking due to its lack of achievements in the field of AI.

Now Microsoft's market value has surpassed Apple by nearly $500 billion, with a Tesla difference in the middle!

The two-way rush and strong alliance between Microsoft and OpenAI have not only won the recognition of the capital market, but also made both parties taste the sweetness in business.

OpenAI's large model has not only brought strong growth to Microsoft's cloud computing business, but also made Office and Windows sexy again among users.

It can be said that Microsoft has seen strong growth in all core business lines because of OpenAI's large model technology.

At the same time, Microsoft also provides enough guarantee for OpenAI in terms of computing power, so that OpenAI can run all the way on the road to AGI without worries.

Before OpenAI found Microsoft, it was revealed that they had also contacted Amazon, but because Amazon thought that OpenAI's requirements were too high, the two sides did not reach an agreement in the end.

After missing out on OpenAI, Amazon learned from the pain and finally invested heavily in the "second OpenAI" - Anthropic at the end of last year.

And after investing in Anthropic, Amazon's stock price rose by nearly 50%, almost reaching an all-time high.

Supported by Anthropic's Claude model, the Amazon Cloud business has also retained its market share.

Amazon has also launched more and more artificial intelligence services on its shopping platform, hoping to use AI to provide users with a more convenient shopping experience.

And Anthropic has lived up to Amazon's expectations, and the Claude 3, which was launched in early March, surpassed GPT-4 to become the most powerful large-scale model product to date.

There is even news that Apple is also approaching Anthropic, hoping to integrate its large model service into Apple's upcoming AI services and ecosystem.

The Big Brother Is Watching On You

However, this kind of giant unicorn, which is popular with capital markets and customers, and the powerful combination with cloud giants, has attracted the attention of regulators.

Previously, foreign media reported that the FTC in the United States has launched an investigation into whether Microsoft's investment in OpenAI involves antitrust issues.

FTC Chair Lina Khan, who has always been very harsh on tech giants, said:

History has shown that new technologies can create new markets and healthy competition. As companies race to develop and monetize AI, we must be wary of tactics that deprive them of this opportunity.

Our research will reveal whether the investments and partnerships pursued by leading companies are at risk of distorting innovation and undermining fair competition.

Moreover, because a large part of the investment of large manufacturers is actually provided to large model companies in the form of computing power, the actual amount of the transaction is far less than disclosed by both parties.

Microsoft and Amazon will re-include the computing power part of the investment in their financial reports as the income of cloud services, and the investment in the computing power part of the transaction will essentially become "left hand out and right hand in".

In addition, both parties often do not disclose the specific amount of computing power investment, which may mislead investors, resulting in regulatory risks in information disclosure.

Resources:

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/27/amazon-spends-2point7b-on-startup-anthropic-in-largest-venture-investment.html