Amazon’s cloud unit signed a $38 billion deal to supply some of OpenAI’s unlimited demand for computing power. Amazon shares rose.
The maker of ChatGPT will pay Amazon Web Services for access to hundreds of thousands of Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) as part of a seven-year contract, the companies announced on Monday.
The deal is the latest indication of OpenAI’s transition from a research lab to an artificial intelligence powerhouse that has reshaped the technology industry. The company has committed to spending $1.4 trillion on infrastructure to build and power its AI models, an unprecedented investment that has raised concerns about a possible bubble.
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For Amazon, which has struggled to compete in the AI era, the deal is an endorsement of its ability to build and operate huge networks of data centers. “As OpenAI continues to push the boundaries of what’s possible, AWS’ cutting-edge infrastructure will serve as the foundation for its AI ambitions,” AWS CEO Matt Garman said in a statement.
Amazon shares rose 4.5% to $255.29 at market open in New York on Monday. Nvidia rose 3.3% to $209.20.
Amazon is the world’s largest seller of rented computing power. But until Monday, AWS was an exception, having watched nearly every other major U.S. cloud computing company join the race to build or retrofit data centers to support OpenAI.
Microsoft — OpenAI’s largest investor and previously its exclusive cloud provider — recently announced a new commitment from OpenAI to spend about $250 billion on its Azure unit. Oracle Corp. closed a $300 billion deal to provide OpenAI with data centers, and earlier this year OpenAI revealed that Alphabet Inc.’s Google Cloud Platform is among the companies powering ChatGPT. The startup also has a $22.4 billion deal with CoreWeave Inc., a leader among a new generation of “neo clouds” offering services to AI developers.
“Adding AWS as a key cloud provider could alleviate some of the pressure for OpenAI, especially as it continues to outsource more contracts to neo cloud providers like CoreWeave, which operate on a much smaller scale than AWS,” Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Anurag Rana and Andrew Girard wrote in a note last week predicting such a deal. AWS could also help OpenAI expand internationally, given its broad global reach of data centers, they said.
In the agreement announced on Monday, OpenAI will immediately begin using the computing power of AWS, with all capacity expected to be delivered by the end of 2026, with the option to expand work with AWS in subsequent years. Amazon will deploy hundreds of thousands of chips, including Nvidia’s GB200 and GB300 AI accelerators, in clusters designed to help ChatGPT produce responses to user commands or train next-generation models.
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“Scaling edge AI requires massive, reliable computing,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement. “Our partnership with AWS strengthens the broad computing ecosystem that will power this new era and bring advanced AI to everyone.”
Amazon is also among the biggest backers of Anthropic PBC, an AI developer founded by OpenAI veterans. The Seattle company announced last week that a data center complex built for the startup, and powered by hundreds of thousands of the AWS-developed Trainium2 AI chip, is operational. Last month, Google said it would supply up to 1 million of its specialized AI chips to Anthropic in a deal valued at tens of billions of dollars.
© 2025 Bloomberg L.P.
