Amazon Web Services (AWS) and OpenAI have entered a multi-year, $38 billion strategic agreement that cements one of the largest infrastructure partnerships in AI history. Announced on November 3, the seven‑year deal gives OpenAI access to AWS’s state‑of‑the‑art computing infrastructure to run and scale its frontier artificial intelligence workloads.
The collaboration builds on both companies’ existing relationship in enterprise AI and further expands OpenAI’s use of AWS cloud resources, following its previously announced availability on Amazon Bedrock.
Expanding compute capacity for frontier AI
Under the arrangement, OpenAI will leverage hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GPUs, including the GB200 and GB300 series, hosted within Amazon EC2 UltraServers. These clusters are designed to optimize AI processing efficiency for both inference, such as powering ChatGPT, and the training of the company’s next‑generation models.
AWS says the partnership will allow OpenAI to scale to tens of millions of CPUs by 2026, with the potential to expand further into 2027 and beyond. The architecture, tailored for low‑latency communication between systems, will enable OpenAI to run complex, interconnected workloads with maximum performance.
“Scaling frontier AI requires massive, reliable compute,” said OpenAI co‑founder and 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 said the platform’s global infrastructure will be central to supporting OpenAI’s growth trajectory.
“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,” he noted.
“The breadth and immediate availability of optimized compute demonstrates why AWS is uniquely positioned to support OpenAI’s vast AI workloads.”
Financial momentum and market reaction
The announcement sparked a record high for Amazon’s shares, which rose about 5% on Monday, adding nearly $140 billion to its market value after a near‑10% jump the previous Friday. Analysts characterized the move as a pivotal moment in the AI infrastructure race.
“This is a hugely significant deal (and is) clearly a strong endorsement of AWS compute capabilities to deliver the scale needed to support OpenAI,” said Paolo Pescatore, analyst at PP Foresight.
The agreement also follows OpenAI’s restructuring last week, which loosened its historical exclusivity with Microsoft and marked another step toward diversifying its cloud partnerships. Reports suggest the company has also engaged Alphabet’s Google and Oracle for separate multi‑year deals, as part of an ambitious plan to expand its global compute footprint.
Feeding the AI infrastructure arms race
The surge in AI development has driven an unprecedented demand for data‑center capacity and specialized chips. OpenAI’s latest investment is part of a broader $1.4 trillion infrastructure plan to expand its processing capabilities, one of the largest capital commitments in the tech industry.
Altman has publicly stated that the company aims to develop 30 gigawatts of power capacity for AI systems. To put that figure into perspective, a single nuclear power plant typically generates around 1 gigawatt; by comparison, 30 gigawatts could power roughly 26 million homes for an entire year.
However, the growing size of these contracts has prompted discussion among industry observers about whether the AI sector may be entering a speculative bubble. Critics note that valuations and spending across leading AI companies are far outpacing short‑term revenue, raising questions about long‑term sustainability.
According to Reuters, OpenAI’s annualized revenue run rate could reach $20 billion by the end of the year, though sources indicate that the company remains unprofitable due to rising infrastructure costs and research commitments.
Looking ahead
The new AWS‑OpenAI partnership is among the clearest signs that Big Tech’s future lies in the consolidation of compute power and AI scalability. For AWS, it reinforces its position as a foundational infrastructure provider for the world’s leading AI companies. For OpenAI, the deal secures the resources required to advance large‑scale model training and global deployment at unprecedented speed.
With capacity planned to be fully online by 2026, the collaboration underscores the extraordinary computational demands driving the next phase of artificial intelligence, and the multibillion‑dollar alliances forming to meet them.
Gunel Ismayilova
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