OpenAI spreads the imaginary wealth beyond Microsoft with $38B AWS deal

Amazon deal still dwarfed by $250B Azure commitment made as part of OpenAI's for-profit transformation

OpenAI has signed a seven-year, $38 billion agreement with Amazon Web Services, adding another hyperscaler alongside Microsoft Azure for its growing AI compute needs. Where it's getting all this money was not disclosed.

It's been less than a week since OpenAI completed its for-profit restructuring that saw Microsoft lose its ability to retain a stranglehold on the AI firm's computing resources, and Altman and company have already inked a $38 billion deal with AWS to start data crunching in another cloud. Prior to the restructuring that closed last Tuesday, Microsoft retained a right of first refusal if OpenAI were to take its cloud computing needs elsewhere, but that portion of the pair's partnership vanished with the AI giant formalizing its transition into a for-profit public benefit corporation. 

The deal will see OpenAI get access to AWS EC2 UltraServers "starting immediately," per a joint press release from the pair. OpenAI's compute capacity on AWS will scale up over the next seven years, ultimately scaling "to tens of millions of CPUs" that the company will use "to rapidly scale agentic workloads." 

"The breadth and immediate availability of optimized compute demonstrates why AWS is uniquely positioned to support OpenAI's vast AI workloads," AWS CEO Matt Garman said of the new partnership. 

Along with access to existing AWS resources, OpenAI will also be getting some custom infrastructure deployed for its use in the coming years that will involve some good old fashioned Nvidia GPUs. Per the press release, AWS is building "a sophisticated architectural design optimized for maximum AI efficiency and performance" using clusters of Nvidia Blackwell GB200 and GB300 chips. Those Nvidia GPUs will be clustered on the same network as EC2 UltraServers, AWS added. 

This announcement comes on the heels of not only OpenAI going for-profit, but also AWS announcing its own rival platform to OpenAI's Stargate project, which aims to build a massive amount of compute power for AI processing with Oracle, Nvidia, and Softbank among OpenAI's partners. While Stargate's launch has been sluggish, AWS' Project Rainier is already up and running, which AWS credited to its total control of its own tech stack, from chips to datacenter design. As was the case last week, AWS credited its "leadership in cloud infrastructure" as one of the reasons OpenAI chose it as its newest cloud computing partner. 

Mind you, with all the money OpenAI has committed to Oracle and Nvidia, among others, it's hard to tell where it will find only $38 billion more. Remember that the company just lost something like $12 billion in the last quarter alone.

While this partnership is a sizable one, we're told it won't include any commingling of OpenAI compute and Project Rainier, which Amazon told The Register is entirely separate from its deal with OpenAI. 

That, and it's not like Sam Altman is walking away from Microsoft entirely: Redmond might have let slip OpenAI's estimated loss last quarter, but that was after Microsoft had already secured a 27 percent share in OpenAI's new public benefit corporation as well as a commitment from the AI upstart to spend $250 billion on Azure to continue fueling the bulk of its cloud computing needs. 

Compared to that, it feels more like OpenAI is having a bit of a teenage moment, symbolically stretching its legs and testing its independence while still staying reliant on papa Satya. ®