Amazon invests $50B in OpenAI, deepens AWS partnership with expanded $100B cloud deal

Amazon is doubling down on OpenAI, announcing a strategic partnership on Friday that includes a $50 billion investment in the maker of ChatGPT.

The companies said Amazon will start with $15 billion, with more than $35 billion expected “in the coming months when certain conditions are met.” The investment is part of OpenAI’s broader $110 billion funding round that includes SoftBank and NVIDIA, and brings the company’s previous valuation to $730 billion.

OpenAI and AWS are also deepening their technology partnership, extending an existing multi-year $38 billion agreement by $100 billion over eight years. OpenAI will run most of its AI workloads on AWS, including a commitment to use up to 2 gigawatts of capacity in Trainium — Amazon’s internal chips designed 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 in 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 the destination for building and deploying OpenAI-enabled software, as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google battle for AI customers and the computing that comes with them. It also gives AWS a high-quality Trainium customer at scale.

“We think they will be one of the biggest winners in AI, we can help them grow, and we believe we will achieve strong profitability for Amazon in the long run,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote on LinkedIn.

Analysts associated with William Blair called the deal a good one for AWS, estimating that an additional $100 billion in OpenAI spending over eight years could amount to about $17 billion a year in revenue if spending is evenly distributed — about 11% of AWS’s expected revenue for 2026, based on consensus forecasts. They also say that OpenAI’s plan to use large amounts of Trainium is a logical endorsement as AWS tries to prove that it can handle large-scale AI work.

They added that the announcement helps add context to Amazon’s plan to spend a record $200 billion in capital spending this year. Amazon also has a significant partnership with OpenAI competitor Anthropic.

Microsoft, a long-time partner and key cloud provider to OpenAIissued a statement on Friday emphasizing that the OpenAI-Microsoft relationship remains strong. “Nothing about today’s announcements in any way changes the terms of the partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI previously shared on our joint blog in October 2025,” the company wrote.

The Redmond-based tech giant added that its commercial and revenue-sharing relationship with OpenAI “has not changed,” and noted that it “always includes revenue sharing from partnerships between OpenAI and other cloud providers.”

Microsoft reiterated that Azure remains the exclusive cloud provider of “stateless OpenAI APIs,” and said that any stateless API calls to OpenAI models that are the result of collaboration with third parties — “including Amazon” — will be handled in Azure.

In basic terms, the “stateless” calls that keep Microsoft special are simple, simultaneous AI requests: ask a question, get an answer. The “good” environment that Amazon is building on AWS is where companies use AI systems that remember context, work on complex tasks over time, and communicate with each other. This is an area where Microsoft is also working with its Copilot and Azure OpenAI Service products, but where Amazon is now staking a big claim, too.

Some key insights from Amazon and the expanded OpenAI partnership:

• AWS and OpenAI said they will integrate a “Robust Runway” powered by OpenAI models, offered through Amazon Bedrock, for customers to build AI applications and agents at a “production level.”
• 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 work together to develop “customized models” to power Amazon’s customer-facing applications.

As GeekWire previously reported, Amazon was actually OpenAI’s first cloud partner — providing computing resources to the lab’s founding in 2015, before Microsoft stepped in to form the partnership that defined the era of generative AI.

Now, ten years later, the company OpenAI that once left because Amazon didn’t care about terms and conditions is writing a $50 billion check to re-enter.