Amazon enters $38 billion partnership with OpenAI
Amazon continues expanding its presence in the burgeoning generative and agentic artificial intelligence marketplace.
The online giant has signed a multi-year, strategic partnership with OpenAI, developer of the ChatGPT generative AI model, that will provide infrastructure from its Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosted cloud division to run and scale OpenAI’s core AI workloads, starting immediately.
Under this new $38 billion agreement, which will have continued growth over the next seven years, OpenAI will have access to AWS compute, comprising hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GPUs, with the ability to expand to tens of millions of CPUs to rapidly scale agentic AI workloads.
OpenAI will immediately start utilizing AWS compute as part of this partnership, with all capacity targeted to be deployed before the end of 2026, and the ability to expand further into 2027 and beyond.
"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. "The breadth and immediate availability of optimized compute demonstrates why AWS is uniquely positioned to support OpenAI's vast AI workloads."
The infrastructure deployment that AWS is building for OpenAI clusters Nvidia GB200 and GB300 GPUs via Amazon EC2 UltraServers on the same network, enabling low-latency performance across interconnected systems with the goal of allowing OpenAI to efficiently run workloads with optimal performance.
The clusters are designed to support various workloads with flexibility to adapt to OpenAI's evolving needs. This new partnership follows OpenAI weight foundations models becoming available on the Amazon Bedrock managed AI cloud platform from AWS. Interestingly, the AWS Claude generative AI foundation model is a competitor with ChatGPT.
"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."
Amazon dives into AI collaborations
Amazon has been actively investing in and forming partnerships with a number of next-gen AI companies.
The company is investing a total of $8 billion in generative AI developer Anthropic, holding a position as a minority investor.) In addition, Anthropic named the AWS as its primary training partner, building on existing agreements for AWS to serve as its primary cloud provider and for Anthropic to AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train, and deploy its future foundation models.
And in January 2024, AWS and Nvidia launched joint effort to create a tool that identifies product listings where the content could be improved and automatically generates revised content, additional advanced AI tools designed to streamline the creation and editing of product listings, and AI-enabled features to assist fashion shoppers and sellers., such as personalized size recommendations.
AWS followed this collaboration up with the integration of the Nvidia Blackwell GPU platform into its offering. Together, AWS and Nvidia seek to deliver infrastructure and tools that allow customers to build and run real-time inference on multi-trillion parameter large language models (LLMs) faster, at massive scale, and at a lower cost than previous-generation Nvidia GPUs running on the Amazon EC2 cloud platform.
[READ MORE: Amazon dives deeper into generative AI with Nvidia integration]
