OpenAI Signs $38 Billion Deal With Amazon
OpenAI signed a multi-year deal with Amazon to purchase $38 billion of AWS cloud infrastructure to train its models and serve its users.
The deal is another sign that the AI industry is becoming increasingly involved, with OpenAI now at the center of major partnerships with industry players including Google, Oracle, Nvidia and AMD.
The AWS deal is also notable because OpenAI rose to prominence in part through its partnership with Microsoft, Amazon’s biggest cloud rival. Amazon is also a major backer of Anthropic, one of OpenAI’s main competitors. Amazon and Microsoft are currently developing their own AI models to compete with startups like OpenAI.
Many now fear that the race to build more and more infrastructure – and the unusual financial deals behind those deals – are a sign of an AI bubble. Between 2026 and 2027, companies are expected to spend more than $500 billion on AI infrastructure in the United States, according to financial journalist Derek Thompson.
Patrick Moorhead, chief analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, believes that large tech companies and AI startups have a real need for more capacity and see a way to turn compute into profit. He adds that the new deal shows that Amazon is not so far behind when it comes to AI after all. “A lot of people said they were on the brink, but they just put $38 billion on the board, right, which is pretty exceptional,” he says.
Moorhead adds that OpenAI’s strategy is to limit its reliance on a single cloud provider. “OpenAI is currently deployed to almost everyone,” he says.
Amazon said in its announcement that it is building custom infrastructure for OpenAI. The configuration includes two types of Nvidia chips, the GB200 and the GB300, which Amazon says will be used for both training and inference. The company also said the deal would give OpenAI access to “hundreds of thousands of cutting-edge NVIDIA GPUs, with the ability to scale to tens of millions of CPUs to rapidly scale agentic workloads.”
OpenAI and other AI players appear to believe that agentic AI will become increasingly important as more users adopt AI tools to navigate the web.
“Scaling edge AI requires massive, reliable computing,” Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, said in the announcement.
OpenAI announced last week that it would adopt a new for-profit structure that should allow it to raise more money. Although the company is still controlled by a nonprofit organization, its for-profit arm has become a public benefit corporation.
