OpenAI signs $38 billion deal with Amazon
OpenAI It signed a multi-year agreement with Amazon to purchase $38 billion worth of AWS cloud infrastructure to train its models and serve its users.
The deal is another sign that the AI industry is becoming increasingly intertwined, with OpenAI now at the center of major partnerships with industry players including Google, Oracle, Nvidia and AMD.
The AWS agreement is also noteworthy because OpenAI came to prominence in part through its partnership with Microsoft — Amazon’s largest cloud competitor. Amazon is also a major backer of one of OpenAI’s main competitors, Anthropic. Amazon and Microsoft are currently developing their own AI models to compete with startups like OpenAI.
Many now worry that the race to build more infrastructure — and the unusual financial agreements behind the deals — are a sign of an AI bubble. Companies are expected to spend more than $500 billion on AI infrastructure in the United States between 2026 and 2027. Financial journalist Derek Thompson reports.
Patrick Moorhead, senior analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, says he believes big tech companies and AI startups have a real need for more capabilities and see a path to turning computing into profit. He adds that the new deal shows that Amazon is not a laggard in the field of artificial intelligence after all. “A lot of people said they were in bankruptcy, but they put $38 billion on the board, right, which is pretty extraordinary,” he says.
Moorhead adds that OpenAI’s strategy is to limit its reliance on any one cloud provider. “OpenAI is deployed with almost everyone at this point,” he says.
Amazon said in its announcement that it is building dedicated OpenAI infrastructure. The setup features two types of Nvidia chips, GB200s and GB300s, which Amazon said will be used for both training and inference. The company also said the deal will provide OpenAI with access to “hundreds of thousands of modern NVIDIA GPUs, with the ability to scale to tens of millions of CPUs to rapidly scale agent workloads.”
OpenAI and other AI players seem to believe that agentic AI will become increasingly important as more users adopt AI tools to navigate the web.
“Scaling AI requires massive, reliable computing,” Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, said in the announcement.
OpenAI He said Last week it said it would adopt a new for-profit structure that would allow it to raise more money. While the company is still controlled by a non-profit organization, its for-profit arm has become a public benefit corporation.