OpenAI and Amazon have officially signed a massive multi-year strategic partnership that includes a staggering $50 billion investment from the cloud computing giant. The deal is an expansion of their previous $38 billion deal, and makes Amazon Web Services the exclusive third-party cloud distributor for OpenAI"s new enterprise platform, Frontier.
Amazon is kicking off the partnership with an initial $15 billion investment, with the remaining $35 billion to follow once certain conditions are met. In return, OpenAI is committing $100 billion to Amazon Web Services over the next eight years to secure cloud infrastructure and custom silicon. This is not a typo; Amazon will first give $50 billion to OpenAI, and then OpenAI will legally be required to spend $100 billion on Amazon Web Services. It’s a classic merry-go-round deal where Big Tech is essentially exchanging money among itself, a phenomenon known as circular investing.
As a part of this massive commitment, OpenAI will consume roughly two gigawatts of Amazon"s custom Trainium compute capacity. OpenAI’s models will run on both current-generation hardware and the upcoming Trainium4 chips expected in 2027.
Besides supporting the distribution of Frontier, the two companies are co-creating a new Stateful Runtime Environment for Amazon Bedrock. The Stateful Runtime Environment should allow developers to build AI applications that retain context and remember prior work, something that’s still tricky today, as most context-aware AI apps still rely on RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) systems, in which models are essentially serving as advanced search engines for embedded documents.
On top of that, OpenAI plans to develop customized AI models that Amazon"s internal teams can use, mostly for working on customer-facing applications. As a reminder, Amazon’s current internal AI already caused a few issues for the company, most notably taking down a portion of AWS"s architecture last December.
"OpenAI and Amazon share a belief that AI should show up in ways that are practical and genuinely useful for people. Combining OpenAI"s intelligence with Amazon"s infrastructure and global reach helps us put powerful AI into the hands of businesses and users at real scale," said OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman.
Given the scale of this deal and OpenAI’s somewhat shaky relationship with Microsoft in the previous period, the public was quick to conclude that the two companies may be drifting away from each other, after a renewed partnership in October 2025. However, both Microsoft and OpenAI expressly released a statement saying that today’s Amazon deal has no effect on their cooperation, and that their “partnership remains strong and central.”
Along with the new Amazon deal, OpenAI also secured $30 billion each from NVIDIA and SoftBank, and closed a $110 billion funding round at a $730 billion pre-money valuation. This was one of the largest private funding rounds in history.