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OpenAI AWS Partnership: OpenAI has reached a landmark agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to purchase $38 billion in cloud computing capacity.
The deal marks the artificial intelligence company’s first major collaboration with the world’s largest cloud provider and highlights its move toward diversifying beyond Microsoft’s infrastructure.
Announced on Monday, the partnership will see OpenAI begin running workloads on AWS immediately. The company will gain access to hundreds of thousands of Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) housed across U.S. data centers.
Both sides plan to expand the available capacity in the years ahead, strengthening OpenAI’s ability to train and deploy advanced AI systems at scale.
Amazon’s stock gained nearly 5% after news broke of its partnership with OpenAI. The first stage of the agreement will rely on Amazon Web Services’ current data centers, while the company plans to build new infrastructure specifically for OpenAI over time.
“This is completely separate capacity that we’re setting up,” said Dave Brown, vice president of compute and machine learning services at AWS, in an interview. “Part of that capacity is already online, and OpenAI has started putting it to use.”
OpenAI has recently accelerated its partnership efforts, unveiling nearly $1.4 trillion in expansion deals with major technology companies such as Nvidia, Broadcom, Oracle, and Google.
The wave of agreements has sparked debate among industry observers, with some warning of a growing AI bubble and questioning whether the U.S. has the capacity and resources to deliver on such large-scale ambitions.
Until this year, OpenAI relied exclusively on Microsoft for its cloud operations.
Microsoft, which first invested in the company in 2019 and has since contributed about $13 billion, ended that exclusivity in January. The tech giant now holds the right of first refusal for any future cloud service requests from OpenAI.
Microsoft’s special cloud arrangement with OpenAI expired last week under new commercial terms, giving the ChatGPT maker greater freedom to collaborate with other major cloud providers.
Even before the change, OpenAI had signed agreements with Oracle and Google, though Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to lead the global cloud market.
“Building and scaling advanced AI systems requires massive and dependable computing power,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in a statement on Monday.
“Our partnership with AWS expands the computing ecosystem that will drive the next wave of innovation and help bring powerful AI capabilities to people everywhere.”
OpenAI will continue to invest heavily in Microsoft’s cloud platform, confirming last week that it plans to purchase an additional $250 billion in Azure services.
For Amazon, the agreement with OpenAI marks a major breakthrough in both scale and significance.
The deal stands out not only for its size but also because Amazon maintains a close partnership with Anthropic, one of OpenAI’s leading competitors.
The tech giant has poured billions into Anthropic and is currently developing an $11 billion data center complex in New Carlisle, Indiana, built specifically to handle Anthropic’s workloads.
“The scale and instant availability of optimized computing power highlight why AWS is uniquely equipped to handle OpenAI’s massive AI workloads,” said Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services, in a statement.
In its earnings report last week, Amazon said AWS revenue rose more than 20% year over year, exceeding analyst expectations.
However, rival cloud providers posted stronger growth, with Microsoft’s cloud business expanding 40% and Google’s rising 34% over the same period.
Starting with Nvidia
The current deal between Amazon and OpenAI focuses on using Nvidia chips, including two of the company’s widely adopted Blackwell models.
There is, however, room to integrate other types of processors in the future. At the same time, Amazon’s in-house Trainium chips are being utilized by Anthropic in its newly developed data center.
“We like Trainium because it delivers better price performance for customers and, more importantly, gives them more options,” said Dave Brown, vice president of compute and machine learning services at AWS.
He added that he could not disclose any details “about work we may have done with OpenAI on Trainium so far.”
The new infrastructure is designed to handle both inference tasks—such as generating ChatGPT’s real-time responses—and the training of OpenAI’s next generation of advanced AI models.
Under the agreement, OpenAI will be able to expand its use of Amazon Web Services over the next seven years, though specific plans beyond 2026 have not yet been determined.
OpenAI’s foundation models, including its open-weight versions, are already available through Bedrock, AWS’s managed service that offers access to some of the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence systems.
Several major companies, including Peloton, Thomson Reuters, Comscore, and Triomics, already rely on OpenAI models through Amazon Web Services for tasks such as coding, data analysis, mathematical computation, and advanced scientific research.
The latest agreement formalizes a direct partnership between OpenAI and AWS. “As part of this deal, OpenAI has become an AWS customer,” said Dave Brown, vice president of compute and machine learning services at AWS.
“They’ve agreed to purchase computing capacity from us, and we’re billing them for that usage. It’s a simple and transparent arrangement.”
For OpenAI, the world’s highest-valued private artificial intelligence firm, the agreement with Amazon Web Services represents another move toward an eventual public listing.
By expanding its partnerships beyond a single cloud provider and securing long-term computing capacity across multiple platforms, the company is demonstrating both independence and growing operational maturity.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently acknowledged during a livestream that an initial public offering is “the most likely path” to meet the company’s funding needs.
Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar has expressed similar views, describing the company’s recent restructuring as a key step toward becoming publicly traded.
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