Amazon stock surged to a new high of US$258.6 before cooling down a bit to US$254 at close of the trading session, up 4 per cent, following news that it has signed a US$38 billion deal with OpenAI that enables the ChatGPT maker to run its artificial intelligence systems on Amazon’s data centres.
As part of the deal, OpenAI will be able to power its AI tools using “hundreds of thousands” of Nvidia’s specialised AI chips through Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Amazon, OpenAI ink multi-billion-dollar deal
The significance of the agreement is that it comes less than a week after OpenAI altered its partnership with long-time backer Microsoft, which was its exclusive cloud computing provider until this year.
Under this new US$38 billion agreement, which will have continued growth over the next seven years, OpenAI is accessing AWS compute comprising hundreds of thousands of state-of-the-art NVIDIA GPUs, with the ability to expand to tens of millions of CPUs to rapidly scale agentic workloads.
AWS has the experience of running large-scale AI infrastructure securely, reliably, and at scale – with clusters topping 500,000 chips. These cloud infrastructure, combined with OpenAI’s advancements in generative AI, will help millions of users continue to get value from ChatGPT.
OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman commented: “Scaling frontier AI requires massive, reliable compute. Our partnership with AWS strengthens the broad compute ecosystem that will power this next era and bring advanced AI to everyone.”
Matt Garman, CEO of AWS, added: “As OpenAI continues to push the boundaries of what’s possible, AWS’ best-in-class infrastructure will serve as a backbone for their AI ambitions. The breadth and immediate availability of optimised compute demonstrates why AWS is uniquely positioned to support OpenAI’s vast AI workloads.”
OpenAI will immediately start utilising AWS compute as part of this partnership, with all capacity targeted to be deployed before the end of 2026, and the ability to expand further into 2027 and beyond.
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