Amazon is doubling down on OpenAI, announcing a strategic partnership Friday that includes a $50 billion investment in the ChatGPT maker.
The companies said Amazon will start with $15 billion, with $35 billion more expected “in the coming months when certain conditions are met.” The investment is part of a broader $110 billion funding round for OpenAI that includes SoftBank and NVIDIA, and brings the company’s pre-money valuation to a whopping $730 billion.
OpenAI and AWS are also deepening their technical ties, expanding an existing $38 billion multi-year agreement by $100 billion over eight years. OpenAI will run more of its AI workloads on AWS, including a commitment to consume 2 gigawatts’ worth of capacity on Trainium — Amazon’s in-house chips built to train and run AI models — to support new OpenAI tools and other computing.
“Combining OpenAI’s models with Amazon’s infrastructure and global reach helps us put powerful AI into the hands of businesses and users at real scale,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement.
The news marks a push to make AWS a go-to place to build and run OpenAI-powered software, as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google battle for AI customers and the computing work that comes with them. It also gives AWS a high-profile customer for Trainium at enormous scale.
“We think they’ll be one of the big winners in AI, we can help them grow, and we believe we’ll earn a strong return for Amazon over the long term,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote on LinkedIn.
Analysts with William Blair called the deal a clear positive for AWS, estimating the added $100 billion in OpenAI usage over eight years could work out to roughly $17 billion a year in revenue if spending is spread evenly — about 11% of AWS’s expected 2026 revenue, based on consensus forecasts. They also said OpenAI’s plan to use huge amounts of Trainium is a meaningful endorsement as AWS tries to prove it can win the biggest AI workloads.
They added that the announcement helps add context to Amazon’s plan to spend a record $200 billion on capital expenditures this year. Amazon also has a key partnership with OpenAI rival Anthropic.
Microsoft, a longtime partner and key cloud provider to OpenAI, issued a statement Friday emphasizing that the OpenAI-Microsoft relationship remains intact. “Nothing about today’s announcements in any way changes the terms of the Microsoft and OpenAI relationship that have been previously shared in our joint blog in October 2025,” the company wrote.
The Redmond tech giant added that its commercial and revenue-sharing relationship with OpenAI “remains unchanged,” and noted that it has “always included sharing revenue from partnerships between OpenAI and other cloud providers.”
Microsoft also reiterated that Azure remains the exclusive cloud provider of “stateless OpenAI APIs,” and said that any stateless API calls to OpenAI models that result from collaborations with third parties — “including Amazon” — would be hosted on Azure.
In basic terms, the “stateless” calls that Microsoft retains exclusivity over are simple, one-and-done AI requests: ask a question, get an answer. The “stateful” environment that Amazon is building on AWS is where companies run AI systems that remember context, work on complex tasks over time, and coordinate with each other. This is territory where Microsoft also operates through its own Copilot products and Azure OpenAI Service, but where Amazon is now staking a major claim, as well.
Other key details from Amazon and OpenAI’s expanded partnership:
- AWS and OpenAI said they will co-create a “Stateful Runtime Environment” powered by OpenAI models, offered through Amazon Bedrock, so customers can build AI applications and agents “at production scale.”
- AWS will be the “exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider” for OpenAI Frontier, an enterprise platform for building and managing teams of AI agents with shared context, governance, and security. Microsoft says Frontier will continue to be hosted on Azure.
- Amazon and OpenAI will collaborate to develop “customized models” to power Amazon’s own customer-facing applications.
As GeekWire previously reported, Amazon was actually OpenAI’s first cloud partner — providing computing resources at the lab’s founding in 2015, before Microsoft swooped in and built the partnership that defined the generative AI era.
Now, a decade later, the company that OpenAI once left because Amazon was being petty about terms and conditions is writing a $50 billion check to get back in.
