After Microsoft, Oracle, Softbank, Amazon bets $38 bn on OpenAI to scale frontier AI; 5 key takeaways

Amazon Web Services has signed a $38 billion, seven-year deal with Sam Altman-led AI major OpenAI, under which AWS will provide OpenAI access to hundreds of thousands of Nvidia graphics processing units, including GB200 and GB300 chips, by 2026. The deal adds to a series of recent agreements signed between OpenAI and other major tech giants, including Microsoft, which has made $250 billion Azure commitment, Oracle ($300 billion), Google Cloud and CoreWeave ($22.4 billion).

For Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, the deal will allow OpenAI to scale ChatGPT inference, training, and agentic AI workloads. "Allows OpenAI to leverage our unusual experience running large-scale AI infrastructure securely, reliably, and at scale. OpenAI will start using AWS’s infrastructure immediately, and we expect to have all of the capacity deployed before the end of next year-- with the ability to expand in 2027 and beyond," Jassy. Sam Altman says it strengthens the broad compute ecosystem that will power this next era and bring advanced AI to everyone. “Scaling frontier AI requires massive, reliable compute."

Key takeaways from OpenAI-Amazon deal:

1.) The multi-year, strategic deal empowers OpenAI with immediate and increasing access to AWS’s cloud infrastructure for its advanced AI workloads. AWS to provide OpenAI with Amazon EC2 UltraServers, featuring hundreds of thousands of chips, and the ability to scale to tens of millions of CPUs for its advanced generative AI workloads. The deal will help OpenAI expand compute capacity while benefiting from the price, performance, scale, and security of AWS.

2) AWS has unusual experience running large-scale AI infrastructure securely, reliably, and at scale–with clusters topping 500K chips. AWS's leadership in cloud infrastructure and OpenAI's pioneering advancements in GenAI could help take ChatGPT to the next level.

3.) The rapid advancement of AI has created unprecedented demand for computing power. As frontier model providers seek to push their models to new heights of intelligence, they need performance, scale, and security, and that's where Amazon comes in as it can provide all the necessary capacity to be deployed by OpenAI. OpenAI will immediately start using AWS compute, with all capacity targeted to be deployed before 2026-end, and the deal could expand into 2027 and beyond.

4.) AWS's infrastructure offerings to OpenAI will include a sophisticated architectural design optimised for maximum AI processing efficiency and performance. Clustering the NVIDIA GPUs—both GB200s and GB300s—via Amazon EC2 UltraServers will provide low-latency performance across interconnected systems, ensuring workloads with optimal performance.

5.) Both companies continue to benefit from each other. Earlier this year, OpenAI opened its weight foundation models became available on Amazon Bedrock, bringing these additional model options to customers on AWS. OpenAI is now one of the most popular publicly available model providers in Amazon Bedrock, with its customers working with their models for agentic workflows, coding, scientific analysis, and mathematical problem-solving.

OpenAI's series of mega deals

OpenAI has been on a massive deal spree in 2025, with mega deals announced with the likes of Microsoft, Oracle, SoftBank, among others. In April this year, OpenAI secured a $40 billion investment from SoftBank, doubling OpenAI’s valuation to $300 billion. OpenAI and Oracle announced in June that they would jointly develop an additional 4.5 gigawatts (GW) of data centre capacity in the U.S., bringing the total Stargate capacity under development to over 5 GW.

This supports OpenAI’s long-term goal of building 10 GW of AI infrastructure in the U.S. within four years. OpenAI is reportedly also in discussions with Reliance Industries Ltd. (RIL), Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), and UAE-based investor MGX to raise more funds, roughly around $40 billion, though the company has not officially revealed it. Microsoft, which has committed over $13 billion in investment since 2019 and is one of its biggest backers, has seen its stake rise to 27% following OpenAI’s October 2025 restructuring. These deals have sent OpenAI’s valuation soaring, with the latest figure suggesting it is at $500 billion after the company's secondary share sale.