Amazon opens $11B Rainier data center project as it looks to deepen Anthropic ties

[aws (Amazon Web Services) office in Houston, Texas, USA.]
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First announced in December 2024, Amazon (AMZN [https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/AMZN]) officially opened its $11B Rainier data center project in Indiana on Wednesday. The site is dedicated to training and running models from generative artificial stalwart Anthropic (ANTHRO [https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/ANTHRO]).

Shares of the Andy Jassy-led Amazon rose 1.5% in premarket trading. Amazon has invested [https://seekingalpha.com/news/4393193-amazon-backed-anthropic-looking-to-raise-2b-in-new-funding-valuing-it-at-60b-report] multiple times in Anthropic, which most recently [https://seekingalpha.com/news/4491301-anthropic-raises-13b-now-valued-at-183b] raised money in September at a $183B valuation.

Project Rainier is spread across 1,200 acres in Indiana and contains approximately 500,000 of Amazon's Trainium2 chips. Eventually, it will house nearly 1M Trainium2 chips, Amazon added in a statement [https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/aws/aws-project-rainier-ai-trainium-chips-compute-cluster].

“Project Rainier is one of AWS’s most ambitious undertakings to date,” said AWS engineer and head architect of Trainium Ron Diamant in the statement. “It’s a massive, one-of-its-kind infrastructure project that will usher in the next generation of artificial intelligence models.”

In addition to running Anthropic's current models, the data center will also be used for updated versions of Anthropic's generative AI chatbot, Claude, Amazon explained.

The unveiling comes after Anthropic announced [https://seekingalpha.com/news/4507912-anthropic-confirms-expanded-deal-with-google-for-cloud-chip-use] earlier this month that it had expanded its partnership with Google (GOOG [https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/GOOG]) (GOOGL [https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/GOOGL]), which will see it use Google's tensor processing units. Anthropic said the expansion of the deal was worth “tens of billions of dollars” and is expected to bring well over a gigawatt of capacity online in 2026.

Anthropic added at the time that it remains “committed” to working with its primary training partner and cloud provider, Amazon.

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