According to reports, Amazon. com pumped another $4 billion into OpenAI competitor Anthropic, as the e-commerce giant goes up against Big Tech rivals in a race to capitalize on generative artificial intelligence technology.

Amazon's stake in the company famed for its GenAI chatbot Claude has doubled, but it is still a minority investor. Like Amazon's prior $4 billion investment, it is made in installments, starting at $1.3 billion and taking the form of convertible notes.

Anthropic is also in talks with additional investors to raise more capital on the back of Amazon backing, sources added,as per reports.

Amazon, which has steadily become Anthropic's main cloud partner, is in a furious battle with Alphabet's Google and Microsoft to provide AI-powered capabilities for its cloud users. As a major distributor of its most recent models, AWS is generating a substantial amount of revenue for Anthropic.

"The investment in Anthropic is essential for Amazon to stay in a leadership position in AI," says D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria.

The increased investment by the e-commerce giant in Anthropic highlights the billions of dollars that have been invested in AI startups in the past year as investors seek to profit from the technology's surge in popularity following the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT in late 2022.

Last month, Microsoft-backed OpenAI collected $6.6 billion from investors, potentially valuing the company at $157 billion and solidifying its place among the world's most valuable private enterprises.

Anthropic intends to use Amazon's Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and implement its core models. Securing expensive AI chips is a big concern for startups since the rigorous process of training AI models demands powerful processors.

"It (partnership) also allows Amazon to promote its AI services such as leveraging its AI chips for training and inferencing, which Anthropic is using,"says Gil.