OpenAI has struck a landmark seven-year, $38 billion agreement with Amazon.com Inc. to purchase cloud services, marking its first major infrastructure move since last week’s restructuring that granted the ChatGPT maker greater operational and financial independence.
The deal cements Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a central player in OpenAI’s bid to expand computing power for the next generation of artificial intelligence models.
Under the agreement, OpenAI will gain access to hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GPUs through AWS to train and deploy its frontier AI systems — a move that underscores the industry’s growing hunger for computing resources. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the deal represents a significant step toward achieving the company’s ambitious target of developing 30 gigawatts of computing power, roughly enough to power 25 million U.S. homes.
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“This is a hugely significant deal and clearly a strong endorsement of AWS compute capabilities to deliver the scale needed to support OpenAI,” said Paolo Pescatore, analyst at PP Foresight.
Altman echoed that sentiment, emphasizing reliability and scale as critical to AI advancement.
“Scaling frontier AI requires massive, reliable compute,” he said. “Our partnership with AWS strengthens the broad compute ecosystem that will power this next era and bring advanced AI to everyone.”
AWS will begin provisioning capacity immediately, with all systems expected to go live by the end of 2026, and more expansions planned through 2027. Amazon will deploy Nvidia’s newest GB200 and GB300 AI accelerators across vast data centers to power OpenAI’s training workloads and the conversational capabilities behind ChatGPT.
The announcement comes as Amazon’s cloud unit regains investor confidence following strong growth in the September quarter. AWS had faced concerns that it was losing ground to Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud in the AI infrastructure race, but Monday’s deal pushed Amazon shares to a record high, adding nearly $140 billion to its market capitalization. The stock surged 5% during trading, following a 10% rally the previous Friday.
The partnership also highlights OpenAI’s diversification strategy. Despite its long-standing alliance with Microsoft — which began in 2019 and saw the software giant take a multibillion-dollar stake — OpenAI has increasingly sought to reduce dependence on a single provider. In addition to AWS, the company has inked a $300 billion cloud supply deal with Oracle and is working with Google Cloud to expand its compute network.
The new arrangement effectively sidelines Microsoft’s exclusive cloud rights, which were removed during last week’s restructuring. OpenAI’s revised governance framework allows the company to seek external investors and explore an initial public offering, which puts the value of the AI leader at up to $1 trillion, according to a Reuters report.
However, the eye-popping spending commitments, estimated at over $1 trillion in total compute investments, have fueled concerns on Wall Street that the AI sector is edging toward a financial bubble. Analysts warn that the enormous infrastructure costs could weigh heavily on OpenAI’s profitability, even as its annualized revenue run rate is projected to reach $20 billion by year-end.
OpenAI’s partnerships with Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, and Google now make it one of the most cloud-diversified AI firms in the world. Yet, questions remain about how the company will finance such extraordinary expansion. The firm is still loss-making, and its capital demands — including Altman’s ambition to add 1 gigawatt of compute capacity per week — are unprecedented in tech history.
The OpenAI deal is seen as a symbolic and financial victory for Amazon, solidifying AWS’s relevance in a hyper-competitive AI arms race. It positions the e-commerce giant’s cloud business as a foundational layer for the most advanced AI systems in development, reaffirming that even as AI models grow more sophisticated, cloud infrastructure remains the backbone of the intelligence revolution.