OpenAI has signed a seven-year, $38 billion deal with Amazon.com (AMZN.O) to buy cloud services, marking its first major move since a restructuring gave the ChatGPT maker greater financial and operational freedom.
The agreement gives OpenAI access to hundreds of thousands of Nvidia processors through Amazon Web Services (AWS) to train and run its AI models. It highlights the growing demand for computing power as companies race to build systems that rival or surpass human intelligence.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company plans to spend $1.4 trillion to build 30 gigawatts of compute capacity, enough to power about 25 million U.S. homes.
“Scaling frontier AI requires massive, reliable compute,” Altman said. “Our partnership with AWS strengthens the broad compute ecosystem that will power this next era and bring advanced AI to everyone.”
The deal is also a major boost for AWS, easing investor concerns that Amazon’s cloud business is losing ground to Microsoft and Google in the AI race. Amazon shares hit a record high after the announcement, adding nearly $140 billion in market value.
Analyst Paolo Pescatore of PP Foresight called it “a hugely significant deal” and “a strong endorsement of AWS’s compute capabilities.”
OpenAI will begin using AWS immediately. Full capacity is expected to go live by the end of 2026, with room for expansion in 2027 and beyond. AWS will roll out Nvidia’s GB200 and GB300 AI accelerators in new data centers to power ChatGPT and OpenAI’s next-generation models.
The deal follows OpenAI’s corporate overhaul, which loosened its ties with Microsoft by ending the company’s first right to supply computing services. Microsoft still holds about a 27% stake in OpenAI but will now compete with Amazon and others for AI infrastructure contracts.
OpenAI has also struck cloud agreements with Google (GOOGL.O) and Oracle (ORCL.N). Reuters earlier reported that OpenAI plans to buy $300 billion in computing power from Oracle over five years and $250 billion from Microsoft’s Azure cloud under separate deals.
The scale of these commitments has raised questions about how OpenAI — still loss-making despite an expected $20 billion annual revenue run rate — will fund its plans. Analysts warn that trillion-dollar valuations and massive infrastructure costs could fuel an AI investment bubble.
