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Canada's CarbonCure to receive Climate Pledge Fund investment from Amazon – Daily Commercial News

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CarbonCure Technologies of Dartmouth, N.S. has attracted more high profile financial investment, this time from a group of global high-tech companies under the banner of Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund. The Canadian company is one of five technology companies to receive the first tranche of what Amazon says is a new $2 billion venture capital initiative.

The other investment recipients announced this month by the Climate Pledge Fund include a technology company that verifies carbon capture in forests; a developer of commercialized technologies to recycle end-of-life lithium batteries into high value metals and chemicals; an EV delivery vehicle manufacturer; and a manufacturer of energy efficient motor systems for use in building infrastructure.

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Amazon’s commitment confirms CarbonCure as a recognized leader in global carbon dioxide reduction (CDR).

“The fact that this investment is being led by big tech companies signals a broader change for industries and governments across the board,” CarbonCure said in a media release.

Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund partners include Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV).

BEV had previously announced its own investment in CarbonCure back in June 2019. In addition to Gates, BEV investors include Michael Bloomberg and Sir Richard Branson.

The patented CarbonCure process involves redirecting CO2 headed into the atmosphere and instead embedding it into concrete used for construction. CO2 emissions are collected from local industrial emitters, purified using the company’s technology, and injected into the concrete at the point of manufacture, after which it is transported to local project sites.

The process has a measurable, positive impact on carbon reduction.

During a recent webinar, Ryan Cialdella, vice-president of research at Ozinga, a major U.S. ready mix concrete supplier, presented performance data collected by his company as a result of using CarbonCure’s technology. The data indicated an average Global Warming Potential (GWP) reduction of 6.2 per cent due to CO2 mineralization across a variety of psi specifications.

GWP is a “measure of how much energy the emissions of one ton of greenhouse gas will absorb over a given period of time relative to equal emissions of carbon dioxide,” as defined by the Environmental Protection Agency.

In addition to removing carbon permanently from the atmosphere, CarbonCure’s CO2 compound actually strengthens the concrete mix, reducing the amount of material required to meet a project’s performance specifications. That reduction in turn offsets the bottom-line costs associated with including the CarbonCure product into the concrete manufacturing process, Ozinga executive vice-president Paul Ozinga explained during the same webinar.

CarbonCure has already gained recognition around the world and claims their technology represents 90 per cent of the current permanent carbon dioxide removal market. The company says that to date seven million cubic yards of low embodied carbon concrete have been supplied across its global network of nearly 300 producers.

The Climate Pledge Fund’s commitment is important for CarbonCure, allowing it to further accelerate its product distribution around the world, said company CEO and Co-Founder Robert Niven.

“The latest investment presents a wonderful opportunity for the global concrete industry to capitalize on the increasing demand for sustainable concrete.”

Matt Peterson, director of Amazon’s new initiatives and corporate development, explained the tech giant’s reasoning behind the creation of the $2 billion venture capital fund in a recent Axios interview.

“This all has to do with Amazon meeting its own corporate goals of being zero carbon by 2040. We are asking, ‘What does Amazon need as a company to de-carbonize?’ We are finding companies that produce those products and investing in them that way. The purpose of the Climate Pledge Fund is to put money behind companies building those solutions. It’s not just what we can do today to de-carbonize but what we can do in the future.”

It should not be forgotten, however, that Amazon is a huge, profit-driven company with investments in a variety of technologies.

“We are not doing this as a charity,” said Peterson. “This is meant to be an investment program that returns on investment.”

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Amazon completes $4B Anthropic investment to advance generative AI – About Amazon

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Amazon concludes $4 billion investment in Anthropic.

Customers of all sizes and industries are using Claude on Amazon Bedrock to reimagine user experiences, reinvent their businesses, and accelerate their generative AI journeys.

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The work Amazon and Anthropic are doing together to bring the most advanced generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) technologies to customers worldwide is only beginning. As part of a strategic collaborative agreement, we and Anthropic announced that Anthropic is using Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud provider for mission critical workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development. Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train, and deploy its future models and has made a long-term commitment to provide AWS customers around the world with access to future generations of its foundation models on Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s fully managed service that provides secure, easy access to the industry’s widest choice of high-performing, fully managed foundation models (FMs), along with the most compelling set of features (including best-in-class retrieval augmented generation, guardrails, model evaluation, and AI-powered agents) that help customers build highly-capable, cost-effective, low latency generative AI applications.

Earlier this month, we announced access to the most powerful Anthropic AI models on Amazon Bedrock. The Claude 3 family of models demonstrate advanced intelligence, near-human levels of responsiveness, improved steerability and accuracy, and new vision capabilities. Industry benchmarks show that Claude 3 Opus, the most intelligent of the model family, has set a new standard, outperforming other models available today—including OpenAI’s GPT-4—in the areas of reasoning, math, and coding.

“We have a notable history with Anthropic, together helping organizations of all sizes around the world to deploy advanced generative artificial intelligence applications across their organizations,” said Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Data and AI at AWS. “Anthropic’s visionary work with generative AI, most recently the introduction of its state-of-the art Claude 3 family of models, combined with Amazon’s best-in-class infrastructure like AWS Tranium and managed services like Amazon Bedrock further unlocks exciting opportunities for customers to quickly, securely, and responsibly innovate with generative AI. Generative AI is poised to be the most transformational technology of our time, and we believe our strategic collaboration with Anthropic will further improve our customers’ experiences, and look forward to what’s next.”

Global organizations of all sizes, across virtually every industry, are already using Amazon Bedrock to build their generative AI applications with Anthropic’s Claude AI. They include ADP, Amdocs, Bridgewater Associates, Broadridge, CelcomDigi, Clariant, Cloudera, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Degas Ltd., Delta Air Lines, Druva, Enverus, Genesys, Genomics England, GoDaddy, Happy Fox, Intuit, KT, LivTech, Lonely Planet, LexisNexis Legal & Professional, M1 Finance, Netsmart, Nexxiot, Parsyl, Perplexity AI, Pfizer, the PGA TOUR, Proto Hologram, Ricoh USA, Rocket Companies, and Siemens.

To further help speed the adoption of advanced generative AI technologies, AWS, Anthropic, and Accenture recently announced that they are coming together to help organizations—especially those in highly-regulated industries including healthcare, public sector, banking, and insurance—responsibly adopt and scale generative AI solutions. Through this collaboration, organizations will gain access to best-in-class models from Anthropic, a broad set of capabilities only available on Amazon Bedrock, and industry expertise from Accenture, Anthropic, and AWS to help them build and scale generative AI applications that are customized for their specific use cases.

Deepening our commitment to advancing generative AI, today we have an update on the announcement we made to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic for a minority ownership position in the company. Last September, we made an initial investment of $1.25 billion. Today, we made our additional $2.75 billion investment, bringing our total investment in Anthropic to $4 billion. To learn more about the broader strategic collaboration between Amazon and Anthropic, of which this investment is one part, check out the stories below:

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Amazon doubles down on Anthropic, completing its planned $4B investment – TechCrunch

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Amazon invested a further $2.75 billion in growing AI power Anthropic on Wednesday, following through on the option it left open last September. The $1.25 billion it invested at the time must be producing results, or perhaps they’ve realized that there are no other horses available to back.

The September deal put $1.25 billion into the company in exchange for a minority stake, and certain tit-for-tat agreements like Anthropic continuing to use AWS for its extensive computation needs.

Amazon reportedly had until the end of the first quarter to decide whether to increase its investment to a maximum of $4 billion, and here we are just before the deadline, and the company has decided to throw in the maximum amount.

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Anthropic’s AI models are one of very few that compete at the highest levels of capability (however you define it) yet are available at scale for enterprises to deploy internally or in user-facing applications. OpenAI’s GPT series and Google’s Gemini are the others up there, but upstarts like Mistral may soon threaten that fragile triumvirate.

Lacking the capability to develop adequate models on their own for whatever reason, companies like Amazon and Microsoft have had to act vicariously through others, primarily OpenAI and Anthropic. The two have reaped immense benefits by allying with one or the other of these moneyed rivals, and as yet have not seen many downsides.

What we can take from Amazon’s decision to invest the maximum after (one must assume) getting a pretty close look at how they make the AI sausage over there is, really, pretty scant.

It makes too much strategic sense for these companies, which possess enormous war chests saved up for exactly this purpose (outspending rivals when they can’t out-innovate them), to pour cash into the AI sector. Right now the AI world is a bit like a roulette table, with OpenAI and Anthropic representing black and red. No one really knows where the ball will land, least of all the companies that couldn’t predict or create this technology themselves. But if your bitter enemy puts their chips down on red, it only makes sense for you to bet on black.

Especially if you can bet on black at a discount — which is what Amazon got here, since it could invest at Anthropic’s September valuation, which is most certainly lower than it is today.

That said, if things were looking sketchy over there — the way they must have looked at Inflection before Microsoft pounced on it — Amazon could have backed out or just invested less than the full supplemental $2.75 billion. But that might have sent a confusing signal no one wants getting out there, least of all existing multibillion-dollar investors.

We know Anthropic has a plan, and this year we’ll find out what Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and other multinational interests think they can do to monetize this supposedly revolutionary technology.

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Canada to tighten foreign investment rules for AI, other sectors

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Canada will require foreign companies to warn the government in advance before making investments or acquisitions in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and space technology, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday, citing an interview with Innovation Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne.

The move will aid the government in conducting a national-security review before transactions get too far advanced and would-be investors may be restricted in their access to target companies’ user data or other property while the inquiry is taking place, the report said.


Click to play video: 'Canadians concerned about risk of AI generated fraud'
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Canadians concerned about risk of AI generated fraud

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The tougher rules will also apply to investments in critical minerals and potentially other sectors, Champagne said to Bloomberg.

Earlier this month, Champagne said Canada will crack down on foreign investment in the interactive digital media sector to stop state-sponsored actors from endangering national security.

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