OpenAI Strikes $38 Billion Cloud Deal With AWS

AWS and OpenAI have announced a $38 billion agreement that enables OpenAI to run its AI workloads on AWS infrastructure, starting immediately.

Under the agreement, OpenAI is accessing AWS compute comprising hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GPUs and can expand to tens of millions of CPUs to scale agentic workloads, the companies said in a Monday (Nov. 3) press release.

OpenAI will start using AWS compute immediately, plans to deploy all the capacity included in this agreement before the end of 2026, and will be able to expand further in 2027 and beyond, according to the release.

“Scaling frontier AI requires massive, reliable compute,” OpenAI Co-founder and CEO Sam Altman said in the release. “Our partnership with AWS strengthens the broad compute ecosystem that will power this next era and bring advanced AI to everyone.”

AWS CEO Matt Garman said in the release that AWS infrastructure will serve as a backbone for OpenAI’s AI ambitions as that company “continues to push the boundaries of what’s possible.”

“The breadth and immediate availability of optimized compute demonstrates why AWS is uniquely positioned to support OpenAI’s vast AI workloads,” Garman said.

In a collaboration launched earlier, the companies said in August that OpenAI open weight foundation models had become available on Amazon Bedrock.

PYMNTS reported on Aug. 6 that this collaboration marked the first time OpenAI’s AI models became available on a cloud computing platform outside of Microsoft, its largest investor to date. Up to that point, OpenAI’s models had only been available in the cloud on Microsoft Azure.

According to the Monday press release, this made those models available to millions of customers on AWS, and OpenAI “has quickly become one of the most popular publicly available model providers in Amazon Bedrock with thousands of customers […] working with their models for agentic workflows, coding, scientific analysis, mathematical problem-solving and more.”

When OpenAI announced on Tuesday (Oct. 28) that it completed a restructuring that transformed its for-profit arm into a public benefit corporation, the company said that it is purchasing another $250 billion worth of Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing services but that Microsoft will no longer have a right of first refusal to be OpenAI’s compute partner.

Microsoft has a 27% stake worth about $135 billion in the public benefit corporation.

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