OpenAI and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have signed a multi-year strategic partnership, which will allow the artificial intelligence giant to exploit Amazon’s cloud infrastructure, freeing itself from the link with Microsoft. The deal is worth $38 billion and sent Amazon shares soaring yesterday on Wall Street.
The terms of the agreement
OpenAI has signed an agreement to purchase capacity from AWS worth $38 billion. Under the terms of the agreement, the startup headed by Sam Altman will immediately begin using existing AWS data centers, taking advantage of the hundreds of thousands of Nvidia chips already present, and then expand capacity in the USA up to tens of millions of CPUs over the next seven years, with the construction of a dedicated unit for OpeAI.
OpenAI will immediately begin using AWS compute as part of this partnership, with the goal of deploying all capacity by the end of 2026 and the ability to expand further in 2027 and beyond.
AWS’ leadership in cloud infrastructure, combined with OpenAI’s pioneering advances in generative artificial intelligence – underlines a note from the startup – will help millions of users continue to derive value from ChatGPT.
Amazon flies to Wall Street
Amazon’s shares took off yesterday on Wall Street, closing up 4% at 254 dollars per share, for a capitalization of 2.7 trillion dollars, confirming itself among the Magnificent Seven of artificial intelligence.
The eCommerce giant (and not only) has achieved a gain of 14% in the last two days, closing the best couple of sessions since November 2022. The performance of the last three months shows a +20%, while the 1-year performance shows an increase of around 30%.
OpeAI continues to invest in computing power
OpenAI recently entered into a series of computing power deals, worth around $1.4 trillion, with Nvidia, Broadcom, Oracle and Google.
“Scaling frontier AI requires massive, reliable computing power,” explained Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, adding, “our partnership with AWS strengthens the broad computing ecosystem that will power this new era and make advanced AI accessible to all.”
Until now, the $500 billion startup had an exclusivity deal with Microsoft, which expired last week, allowing the company to turn to others as well. With Microsoft, OpenAI has invested around 13 billion dollars since 2019. Altman’s company, however, intends to continue its collaboration with Microsoft and just a week ago announced investments in Azure services, Microsoft’s cloud platform, for an incremental amount of 250 billion dollars.
