Amazon announced plans to invest $4 billion in Anthropic and take a minority stake in the generative AI specialist, in a deal which represents a major bet by the company in the much-hyped technology.

As part of the strategic collaboration, Amazon’s cloud unit AWS will become Anthropic’s primary provider for mission critical workloads including safety research and future foundation model development.

Amazon employees and cloud customers will also gain early access to models developed by Anthropic and integrate the technology within their work and businesses through Amazon Bedrock, AWS’ fully managed service to build AI applications.

Another part of the deal will see Anthropic train its future AI foundation models on Amazon’s proprietary Trainium and Inferentia chips. Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO said the deepened collaboration will help improve customer experiences.

Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, added the pair will look to “unlock new possibilities for organisations of all sizes, as they deploy Anthropic’s safe, state-of-the-art AI systems together with AWS’s leading cloud technology”.

Amazon becomes Anthropic’s latest high-profile backer, following funding from Google, Zoom Video Communications and SK Telecom.

Despite taking a minority stake, Amazon added it will not take a board seat in Anthropic.