OpenAI signs $38-bn multi-year cloud partnership with Amazon Web Services

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OpenAI on Monday announced that it has entered into a multi-year strategic partnership worth $38 billion with Amazon Web Services (AWS), aimed at providing the ChatGPT maker with access to AWS’s advanced cloud infrastructure to support its growing artificial intelligence (AI) workloads.

 

The deal marks the first major announcement since OpenAI’s restructuring last week, which freed the ChatGPT maker from its non-profit framework. It also forms part of a broader strategy by OpenAI and its largest investor, Microsoft, to reduce their mutual dependence, according to Reuters.

 

Under the agreement, OpenAI will gain immediate and expanding access to AWS compute resources, including Amazon EC2 UltraServers equipped with thousands of Nvidia chips, and the capability to scale to millions of CPUs, OpenAI said in a blog post.

 

The seven-year partnership is aimed at helping OpenAI rapidly expand its compute capacity while leveraging AWS’s price, performance, scale, and security, it added. 

 

AWS said its infrastructure for OpenAI will use state-of-the-art Nvidia GB200 and GB300 GPUs, clustered through EC2 UltraServers to enable high-efficiency AI processing across interconnected systems. The deployment is expected to support both ChatGPT inference and the training of next-generation models, the company added.

 

“Scaling frontier AI requires massive, reliable compute,” said OpenAI co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Sam Altman. “Our partnership with AWS strengthens the broad compute ecosystem that will power this next era and bring advanced AI to everyone.”

 

AWS CEO Matt Garman added, “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 optimised compute demonstrate why AWS is uniquely positioned to support OpenAI’s vast AI workloads.”

 

According to AWS, all compute capacity under this partnership is expected to be deployed by the end of 2026, with the potential to expand further into 2027 and beyond. 

OpenAI expands cloud partnerships

Earlier this year, OpenAI made its foundation models available on Amazon Bedrock, an AWS-managed service for generative AI. Following the restructuring, the company also announced an agreement to purchase an additional $250 billion worth of cloud computing services from Microsoft Azure.

 

According to Reuters, OpenAI has also engaged Google to supply cloud infrastructure and has reportedly signed a separate $300-billion, five-year agreement with Oracle to secure additional computing power.