OpenAI signs $38 billion cloud deal with Amazon’s AWS to scale AI workloads

OpenAI has signed a multi-year strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) worth $38 billion to run and scale its artificial intelligence workloads on the cloud provider’s infrastructure.

Under the deal, OpenAI will use AWS’s computing resources, including hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GPUs, to power its next generation of generative AI models and applications such as ChatGPT.

The partnership gives OpenAI access to Amazon EC2 UltraServers and will expand through 2027, the companies said in a joint statement.

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

AWS, which operates some of the world’s largest clusters for AI training and inference, will provide infrastructure designed for low-latency performance and high processing efficiency, according to the statement.

“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 move comes amid growing competition among cloud providers to host leading AI firms, as demand for high-performance computing surges globally.

“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 optimised compute demonstrates why AWS is uniquely positioned to support OpenAI's vast AI workloads.”

The deal is also a major vote of confidence for AWS, which some investors feared had fallen behind rivals Microsoft and Google in the AI race.

Shares of Amazon jumped nearly 5% to an all-time high of USD 256, with the company set to add nearly $140 billion to its market value.

Earlier this year, OpenAI’s open-weight foundation models were made available on Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s service for accessing generative AI models, where they have been adopted by thousands of enterprise customers, including Thomson Reuters, Peloton, and Comscore.