OpenAI rival Anthropic is in talks to raise $2 billion in new capital in a funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The round, which The Journal reports would value Anthropic at $60 billion, would bring Anthropic’s total raised to $15.7 billion, going by Crunchbase’s data. It would also make the company the fifth-most valuable U.S. startup after SpaceX, OpenAI, Stripe, and Databricks.
AI companies have been forced to raise enormous sums of money to fund the development and scaling of their technologies, which tend to be incredibly compute-intensive. OpenAI raised $6.6 billion in a funding round last October, and Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI, raised $6 billion in November.
Anthropic’s new round, should it close successfully, would add to the $4 billion the company raised from Amazon in November 2024. As part of that deal, Anthropic agreed to make Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud computing division, its primary AI model training partner and help optimize Amazon’s AI accelerator chips.
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