Amazon has announced an expanded partnership with Anthropic, the maker of the Claude AI, and will invest up to $4 billion.

Anthropic has been developing the Claude AI as a competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. The company has already scored some high-profile partnerships, most notably with Zoom, for the latter to integrate Claude with their software.

As part of the expanded partnership, Anthropic will use AWS as its primary cloud provider for all mission-critical workloads and will rely on AWS for the majority of its workloads. At the same time, AWS customers will benefit by gaining access to Anthropic AI foundation models via Amazon Bedrock.

“We have tremendous respect for Anthropic’s team and foundation models, and believe we can help improve many customer experiences, short and long-term, through our deeper collaboration,” said Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO. “Customers are quite excited about Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s new managed service that enables companies to use various foundation models to build generative AI applications on top of, as well as AWS Trainium, AWS’s AI training chip, and our collaboration with Anthropic should help customers get even more value from these two capabilities.”

“We are excited to use AWS’s Trainium chips to develop future foundation models,” said Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic. “Since announcing our support of Amazon Bedrock in April, Claude has seen significant organic adoption from AWS customers. By significantly expanding our partnership, we can unlock new possibilities for organizations of all sizes, as they deploy Anthropic’s safe, state-of-the-art AI systems together with AWS’s leading cloud technology.”

Interestingly, the news seems to be a blow to Google Cloud. In early February, Google Cloud announced a $300 million investment in Anthropic, one that would see the AI firm run Claude on Google Cloud. At the time, Google was desperately looking for an answer to Microsoft’s Bing AI, based on OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

With Anthropic now pivoting to AWS, the deal appears to be a setback for Google Cloud.