AWS, OpenAI Sign $38B Strategic Compute Deal
Amazon Web Services (AWS) and OpenAI have entered into a landmark $38 billion, multi-year strategic partnership that will provide OpenAI with dedicated access to AWS’s large-scale, secure cloud infrastructure to run and expand its core artificial intelligence workloads. The agreement is structured for continued growth over the next seven years and represents one of the largest cloud compute commitments ever announced.
Under the deal, OpenAI will gain access to “hundreds of thousands” of cutting-edge NVIDIA GPUs running on AWS, with the capability to scale to tens of millions of CPUs to support rapidly expanding and increasingly agentic AI workloads. OpenAI will begin using AWS compute immediately, with all contracted capacity expected to be deployed before the end of 2026 and options to expand into 2027 and beyond.
“AWS has unusual experience running large-scale AI infrastructure securely, reliably, and at scale—with clusters topping 500K chips,” AWS wrote in a company blog post. “AWS’s leadership in cloud infrastructure, combined with OpenAI’s pioneering advancements in generative AI, will help millions of users continue to get value from ChatGPT.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman emphasized that access to diversified compute ecosystems is essential at this stage of AI evolution. “Scaling frontier AI requires massive, reliable compute. Our partnership with AWS strengthens the broad compute ecosystem that will power this next era and bring advanced AI to everyone.”
The AWS agreement marks the latest in a series of major partnerships OpenAI has secured to expand compute access across multiple vendors, including NVIDIA, AMD, Broadcom, and Oracle.
The deal also follows OpenAI’s recent amendment to its partnership with Microsoft, which removed Microsoft’s right of first refusal to serve as OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider. As part of the updated arrangement, Microsoft disclosed that OpenAI has committed to purchase an additional $250 billion of Azure services.
Photo provided by AWS.
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