Top News

The deal marks OpenAI's first major cloud contract with AWS and follows a sweeping corporate overhaul last week.

- OpenAI signed a seven-year, $38 billion deal with Amazon

- OpenAI begins immediate use of AWS resources

- The partnership ends Microsoft's exclusive cloud provider status for OpenAI

OpenAI announced a $38 billion, seven-year deal with Amazon's AWS, granting the ChatGPT developer access to vast computing resources to train and deploy its AI models. The agreement includes hundreds of thousands of Nvidia's latest GPUs—key for training advanced AI—and tens of millions of conventional CPUs for running "agentic" AI systems in everyday applications.

The deal marks OpenAI's first major cloud contract with AWS and follows a sweeping corporate overhaul last week. Regulators in California and Delaware approved OpenAI's transition to a for-profit public benefit corporation, freeing it from nonprofit constraints and enabling broader capital raises. This restructure also revised OpenAI's longstanding partnership with Microsoft, ending the Redmond giant's exclusive cloud rights that dated back years and had been loosened since January 2025.

"Scaling frontier AI requires massive, reliable compute," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement. "Our partnership with AWS strengthens the broad compute ecosystem that will power this next era." AWS CEO Matt Garman added that the cloud unit is "uniquely positioned to support OpenAI's vast AI workloads."

OpenAI's 2025 infrastructure spree now exceeds $1 trillion in committed deals, including pacts with Oracle (up to $300 billion), AMD, Broadcom, Nvidia, and the $500 billion Stargate supercomputer project with Oracle and SoftBank. Despite projected 2025 revenues in the tens of billions, the company remains unprofitable, reporting a $12 billion quarterly loss in Microsoft's latest filings.

Amazon shares surged 4-5% on the news, hitting a record high and adding roughly $140 billion to its market value.

What the Deal Means for OpenAI, Amazon, and the AI Future

For OpenAI, the AWS pact accelerates diversification away from Microsoft, which partly owns the startup but now holds a reduced control stake. This multi-cloud strategy secures the explosive compute needed to maintain leadership in generative AI, where demand for Nvidia chips and data centers has skyrocketed.

Amazon gains a marquee client for AWS, its profit engine, validating billions invested in AI-ready infrastructure. The deal bolsters AWS against rivals Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, while tying OpenAI closer to Amazon's ecosystem—building on prior integration of OpenAI's open-weight models into AWS services like Bedrock.