OpenAI in $38 Billion Deal with Amazon AWS

OpenAI and Amazon AWS announced a new multi-year strategic partnership that’s valued at $38 billion. Basically, OpenAI will host some of its AI compute infrastructure on Amazon AWS now that a new contract with Microsoft allows this.

“Scaling frontier AI requires massive, reliable compute,” OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman said. “Our partnership with AWS strengthens the broad compute ecosystem that will power this next era and bring advanced AI to everyone.”

“As OpenAI continues to push the boundaries of what’s possible, AWS’s best-in-class infrastructure will serve as a backbone for their AI ambitions,” AWS CEO Matt Garman added. “The breadth and immediate availability of optimized compute demonstrates [sic] why AWS is uniquely positioned to support OpenAI’s vast AI workloads.”

Under the terms of this deal, OpenAI gets “immediate and increasing” access to the AWS EC2 UltraServer (Nvidia-based) infrastructure, which features “hundreds of thousands of chips and the ability to scale to tens of millions of CPUs for its advanced generative AI workloads.” OpenAI can train new AI models and serve ChatGPT and agentic AI queries on AWS. And AWS gets … Nothing obvious that I can see in the announcement. I guess they will be paid by OpenAI, somehow, for that compute access.

It increasingly appears that money that doesn’t exist is being passed between several of the world’s biggest companies in ever-more-complex ways. Amazon has invested several billion dollars directly in Anthropic, for example, and it now hosts most of that company’s infrastructure in a new $11 billion datacenter in Indiana. But Anthropic also recently struck a deal with Google to gain access to a gigawatt of Google Cloud infrastructure starting in 2026, at a value of tens of billions of dollars.

That said, no company is more promiscuous or aggressive than OpenAI, which now plans to spend over $1.4 trillion on AI infrastructure that it does not own and cannot pay for. Much of that is already promised: OpenAI has a $300 billion commitment to Oracle, a $100 billion commitment to Nvidia, and a $250 billion commitment to Microsoft for AI infrastructure and, like the Amazon deal, each extends over several years. And it has other deals with AMD, Broadcom, SoftBank, and even the United Arab Emirates. For its part, Amazon has promised to more than double its spending on AI infrastructure this year, as have its competitors.