Amazon has entered a landmark $38 billion agreement with OpenAI, marking one of the largest cloud computing partnerships in the artificial intelligence sector to date.
The multi-year deal will see OpenAI purchase cloud services from Amazon Web Services (AWS) over the next seven years to power and scale its generative and agentic AI systems.
The collaboration strengthens Amazon’s foothold in the fast-growing AI infrastructure market, while providing OpenAI with expanded access to AWS’s advanced computing capabilities.
Under the partnership, OpenAI will gain access to AWS compute resources that include hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GPUs, with room to scale up to tens of millions of CPUs as demand for AI workloads grows. All capacity is expected to be in place by the end of 2026, with further expansion planned into 2027 and beyond.
“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 optimized compute demonstrates why AWS is uniquely positioned to support OpenAI’s vast AI workloads.”
AWS’s infrastructure deployment for OpenAI links Nvidia GB200 and GB300 GPUs through Amazon EC2 UltraServers, designed to enable ultra-low latency and high-performance networking across interconnected systems.
The setup allows OpenAI to run increasingly complex workloads efficiently while maintaining flexibility for future needs.
This latest partnership builds on earlier collaborations between the two companies, including the availability of OpenAI foundation models on Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s managed AI service. Notably, Bedrock also hosts Anthropic’s Claude model, a direct competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
“Scaling frontier AI requires massive, reliable compute,” said OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman. “Our partnership with AWS strengthens the broad compute ecosystem that will power this next era and bring advanced AI to everyone.”
Amazon’s deal with OpenAI follows a series of strategic AI investments.
The retailer has committed $8 billion to Anthropic, positioning itself as a minority shareholder and primary training partner. Anthropic now relies on AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build and deploy its next-generation foundation models.
Earlier collaborations between AWS and Nvidia have also focused on creating AI tools for e-commerce, including automated product listing improvements and personalized shopping features.
AWS has since integrated Nvidia’s Blackwell GPU platform, allowing customers to run large-scale language models faster and at lower cost than previous GPU generations.
Click here to sign up to Retail Gazette‘s free daily email newsletter
