Photo Credit: Getty Images
OpenAI has signed a $38 billion cloud computing agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS), marking its largest partnership yet with the world's top cloud provider and a major step away from its longtime exclusive alliance with Microsoft.
Under the multi-year deal announced Monday, OpenAI will immediately begin running workloads on AWS infrastructure, tapping into hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GPUs housed across Amazon's U.S. data centers. The partnership gives OpenAI flexibility to scale through 2026 and beyond as demand for AI model training and deployment continues to surge.
"This collaboration strengthens the broad compute ecosystem powering the next era of AI," said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, noting that scaling frontier AI "requires massive, reliable compute."
The first phase will utilize existing AWS capacity, while Amazon plans to expand infrastructure dedicated to OpenAI's needs. "Some of that capacity is already live, and OpenAI is making use of it," AWS vice president Dave Brown told CNBC.
Shares of Amazon rose more than 5% following the announcement.
Until earlier this year, Microsoft was OpenAI's exclusive cloud partner, investing $13 billion since 2019. However, a revised agreement in late October allowed OpenAI to negotiate freely with other hyperscalers, including Oracle and Google Cloud. The Amazon deal, though, is by far the largest and most significant.
For Amazon, the partnership is notable given its existing ties to Anthropic, a major OpenAI rival. AWS CEO Matt Garman called the deal "proof of the breadth and reliability of our compute platform."
The infrastructure will support both inference, like ChatGPT's real-time interactions, and training of next-generation foundation models. OpenAI's systems are already available on AWS's Bedrock platform, used by clients such as Peloton and Thomson Reuters for generative and analytical tasks.
As OpenAI diversifies its cloud partnerships, industry watchers see the move as a signal of independence ahead of a potential IPO. Altman has hinted that a public listing is "the most likely path" given the company's growing capital demands.
