E-commerce giant Amazon said on Monday that it would invest up to $4 billion in the artificial intelligence company Anthropic and take a minority ownership position in the company.

According to Amazon, the move underscores the company’s aggressive AI push as it looks to keep pace with rivals such as Google, Microsoft, and Alphabet’s Microsoft.

As part of the strategic collaboration between the two startups, Amazon Web Services was selected as the primary cloud provider by the startup for its storage needs, as the two firms announced on Monday.

The e-commerce giant Amazon has announced a $4 billion investment in Anthropic, an artificial intelligence company which it will own a minority stake in and invest further into.

As Amazon seeks to keep pace with its rivals, such as Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google, the move underscores the company’s aggressive AI development strategy.

The company was founded just over two years ago by former OpenAI executives who have recently introduced their AI chatbot, called Claude 2, to the market.

In order to capitalize on the hype and promise of generative AI, Amazon is looking to use technology such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT as well as Anthropic’s Claude chatbots that are part of the OpenAI project.

Earlier this week, the two firms announced that they are collaborating strategically to advance generative artificial intelligence, with the startup selecting Amazon Web Services as its primary provider of cloud services. Anthropic announced that AWS customers would have early access to features that will allow them to customize their models and fine-tune them.

It is also anticipated that Anthropic will use custom-designed semiconductors from AWS to train the foundational models that form the basis of its AI applications. A foundation model is a large AI program that has been trained on a large number of relevant data sets in order for them to be adapted to solve a wide range of different problems.