On Monday, OpenAI announced has signed a seven-year, $38 billion deal to buy cloud services from Amazon Web Services to power products like ChatGPT and Sora. It is the company’s first major IT deal after a fundamental restructuring last week that gave OpenAI more operational and financial freedom from Microsoft.
The deal gives OpenAI access to hundreds of thousands of Nvidia graphics processors to train and run its AI models. “Scaling the AI frontier requires massive, reliable computing,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement. “Our partnership with AWS strengthens the broad computing ecosystem that will power this next era and bring advanced AI to everyone.”
OpenAI will reportedly use Amazon Web Services immediately, with all planned capacity coming online by the end of 2026 and room to expand further in 2027 and beyond. Amazon plans to deploy hundreds of thousands of chips, including Nvidia’s GB200 and GB300 AI accelerators, into data pools created to power ChatGPT responses, generate AI videos, and train the next wave of OpenAI models.
Wall Street apparently liked the deal, because Amazon stock hit an all-time high on Monday morning. Meanwhile, shares of Microsoft, a long-time OpenAI investor and partner, briefly fell following the announcement.
Massive AI computing requirements
It’s no secret that running generative AI models for hundreds of millions of people currently requires massive computing power. Amid chip shortages in recent years, finding sources of that computing power has been difficult. OpenAI is reportedly working on its own GPU hardware to help ease the strain.
But for now, the company needs to find new sources of Nvidia chips, which speed up AI calculations. Altman has previously said that the company plans spend 1.4 trillion dollars develop 30 gigawatts of computing resources, enough to power approximately 25 million American homes, according to Reuters.
