OpenAI signs $38 bn infrastructure deal with cloud giant AWS

WASHINGTON: ChatGPT-maker OpenAI signed a $38 billion deal Monday with Amazon’s AWS cloud computing arm, as the artificial intelligence company continues on a major partnership spree that has also included Oracle, Broadcom, AMD and chip-making juggernaut Nvidia.

Under the seven-year agreement, OpenAI, which is partly owned by AWS’s archrival Microsoft, will gain access to computing resources including hundreds of thousands of state-of-the-art Nvidia GPUs, the crucial component of the generative artificial intelligence revolution.

The deal, which will grow over its multi-year term, will also give access to tens of millions of more conventional CPUs that will be used for the everyday deployment of so-called agentic AI.

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

OpenAI will immediately begin utilizing AWS computing, with all capacity targeted to be used before the end of 2026, and the ability to expand further in the coming years.

By some estimates, OpenAI has inked approximately $1 trillion worth of infrastructure deals in 2025, including a $300 billion Oracle deal and a $500 billion Stargate project with Oracle and SoftBank.

The massive infrastructure spending comes as revenues in 2025 are expected to be in the tens of billions this year, a very high figure for a startup, but far from the amount needed to recoup the costs of computing needed to power OpenAI’s powerful chatbots.

The deal was the first one since OpenAI formalized its new structure, in which the company has a freer hand to move away from its non-profit origins and deliver profits for its investors.

The partnership with AWS builds on existing collaboration between the companies, with OpenAI’s more open-source models already available on Amazon servers.