Amazon’s $38 Billion OpenAI Deal Shows It Is No Longer an AI Laggard
Major Strategic Partnership
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced a multi-year, $38 billion strategic partnership with OpenAI, marking a significant shift in Amazon’s position within the artificial intelligence (AI) landscape. This deal underscores Amazon’s commitment to becoming a leading provider of AI infrastructure and services, moving beyond its previous reputation as an AI laggard.
Immediate and Scalable Compute Access
Under the agreement, OpenAI will gain immediate and increasing access to AWS’s world-class infrastructure for its advanced AI workloads. AWS will provide OpenAI with Amazon EC2 UltraServers, featuring hundreds of thousands of state-of-the-art NVIDIA GPUs, and the ability to scale to tens of millions of CPUs for its generative AI workloads. This infrastructure is designed to support both inference for ChatGPT and training of next-generation models, with all capacity targeted for deployment before the end of 2026.
Optimized Architectural Design
The infrastructure deployment includes a sophisticated architectural design optimized for maximum AI processing efficiency and performance. By clustering NVIDIA GPUs—both GB200s and GB300s—via Amazon EC2 UltraServers on the same network, AWS enables low-latency performance across interconnected systems. This setup allows OpenAI to efficiently run workloads with optimal performance, adapting to evolving needs.
Leadership Perspectives
- “Scaling frontier AI requires massive, reliable compute,” said OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman. “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,” said Matt Garman, CEO of AWS.
Broader Impact and Availability
- OpenAI’s open weight foundation models are now available on Amazon Bedrock, bringing these additional model options to millions of customers on AWS.
- OpenAI has quickly become one of the most popular publicly available model providers in Amazon Bedrock, with thousands of customers—including Bystreet, Comscore, Peloton, Thomson Reuters, Triomics, and Verana Health—working with their models for agentic workflows, coding, scientific analysis, mathematical problem-solving, and more.
- To get started with OpenAI’s open weight models in Amazon Bedrock, visit:
AWS Bedrock OpenAI.
Industry Context
- The rapid advancement of AI technology has created unprecedented demand for computing power. As frontier model providers seek to push their models to new heights of intelligence, they are increasingly turning to AWS due to the performance, scale, and security it can achieve.
- This news continues the companies’ work together to provide cutting-edge AI technology to benefit organizations worldwide.
External Links
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AWS Bedrock OpenAI
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AWS and OpenAI Announce Multi-Year Strategic Partnership
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Amazon, OpenAI Strike $38 Billion Nvidia Chip Deal
