OpenAI today announced a major AI cloud infrastructure partnership with AWS. Until the start of the year, Microsoft Azure had an exclusive partnership with OpenAI to provide AI and cloud infrastructure.
Because of the huge demand for compute by OpenAI, Microsoft relaxed its partnership terms that allowed OpenAI to build its own AI infrastructure primarily for research and training models. But Microsoft had the right of first refusal (ROFR). Last month, as part of the expanded partnership with OpenAI, Microsoft announced key changes to the partnership that allowed OpenAI to host non-API products (like ChatGPT and Sora) on any cloud provider.
Following these updated partnership terms, today, OpenAI announced a multi-year partnership with AWS to run and scale OpenAI’s core AI workloads starting immediately. As part of this deal, OpenAI will be paying about $38 billion to AWS over the next seven years. Basically, AWS is renting out thousands of NVIDIA GB200s and GB300s GPUs via Amazon EC2 UltraServers to OpenAI.
AWS mentioned that OpenAI is expected to use all the planned capacity before the end of 2026, and it may further expand in 2027. AWS also highlighted that the infrastructure can be used for both inference for ChatGPT and for training next-generation models.
Matt Garman, CEO of AWS, said the following regarding the OpenAI partnership:
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. The breadth and immediate availability of optimized compute demonstrates why AWS is uniquely positioned to support OpenAI"s vast AI workloads.
Until recently, OpenAI"s AI models were available only on the Microsoft Azure platform. But recently, OpenAI released its first open-weight model, which allowed AWS to host it for its customers via Amazon Bedrock. Amazon today highlighted that OpenAI"s gpt-oss models have become one of the most popular publicly available model providers in Amazon Bedrock, with thousands of customers including Comscore, Peloton, Thomson Reuters, and more.