Amazon, the company that was born 30 years ago as an online bookstore, is betting everything on artificial intelligence. The company founded by Jeff Bezos has just announced that it will lay off 16,000 workers and close hundreds of stores in its Amazon Fresh supermarkets and Amazon Go convenience stores. He wants to focus his efforts on accelerating in what is consuming huge amounts of resources. For them, the technology giant plans to invest in OpenAI, the pioneering company in the development of this technology and owner of ChatGPT.
The e-commerce giant is in negotiations with to invest up to $50 billion, as reported this Thursday The Wall Street Journal.
Negotiations are taking place at the highest level. The CEO of Amazon, Andy Jassy, and the head of OpenAI, Sam Altman, are in talks to unblock the operation.
ChatGpt’s parent company needs more than $100 billion to maintain investments. It needs the resources to continue building dozens of data centers, with hundreds of computers that use very expensive ultra-advanced microprocessors to develop the models. And power plants to power all those servers. In no other industrial revolution in history were so many investments concentrated in such a short period of time.
Likewise, as noted by Bloomberg, Altman has also met with major investors in the Middle East for a financing round that could value the ChatGPT maker at up to $830 billion. At the moment, neither company has commented.
In the sector, there are concerns about the cross-relationships between all the protagonists of the AI race, with cross-investments and alliances, which raises the risk of a technological bubble, which is beginning to have many parallels with that of the early 2000s.
In the context of its commitment to carve out an important niche in the world of artificial intelligence, Jeff Bezos’ company announced last December the launch, through its Amazon Web Services (AWS) division, that it would challenge Nvidia, the current leader in this market. Shortly before, the technology giant also announced the expansion of its capacity to provide artificial intelligence infrastructure and high-performance computing services to US government entities.
The news comes just one day after Amazon announced that, in a . The adjustment is part of a strong restructuring launched by the American technology giant, following the over-hiring recorded during the years after the pandemic and the expansion of the adoption of artificial intelligence tools. The layoffs would affect workers in Amazon Web Services, retail, Prime Video and human resources. As a whole, the company has nearly 1.5 million employees worldwide.
Amazon, which presents its fourth quarter results next week, of Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go in the US to focus its efforts on sales online and home deliveries. This reorganization will also mean the dismissal of hundreds of workers from these establishments, although the group indicated that it will work on relocating these personnel to other internal positions.
Looking ahead to the aforementioned 2025 accounts, Amazon is close to exceeding $700 billion in revenue, which would be a new record. The group founded by Jeff Bezos recorded a business volume of 503,538 million between January and September, with a growth of 13% in the third quarter. For the fourth quarter, Amazon forecast sales between 206,000 and 213,000 million, with growth between 10% and 13%.
