Anthropic has raised $3.5 billion at a $61.5 billion post-money valuation.
The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, Cisco Investments, D1 Capital Partners, Fidelity Management & Research Company, General Catalyst, Jane Street, Menlo Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures, among other new and existing investors.
Along with continuing to develop its AI models and fund research in mechanistic interpretability and alignment, Anthropic plans to use the money to expand its compute capacity.
The Series E comes after several rounds led by cloud providers Google and Amazon.
Google pumped $300 million into Anthropic back in 2022, $2 billion in 2023, and another $1 billion this January. Rival Amazon has invested some $8 billion into Anthropic, which made it the company's "primary cloud and training partner."
Anthropic plans to use "AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its future foundation models" alongside Nvidia GPUs.
As part of the partnership, Amazon wants to build 'Project Rainier,' a cluster of Trainium2 UltraServers containing hundreds of thousands of Trainium chips interconnected with third-generation, low-latency petabit scale EFA networking.
The company claims that, once completed, it is expected to be one of the world’s largest AI compute clusters.
