AWS and OpenAI sign AI scaling deal

By Alimat Aliyeva

Amazon and OpenAI have announced a $38 billion strategic partnership that will give Sam Altman’s AI company access to Amazon Web Services (AWS) capabilities to scale computing and advance generative AI, Azernews reports.

According to CNBC, under the terms of the seven-year agreement, OpenAI will have direct access to AWS infrastructure, including Amazon EC2 UltraServers clusters, which combine hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GPUs and can scale up to tens of millions of processors.

All computing power is expected to be deployed by the end of 2026, with potential further expansion in 2027.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, highlighted the importance of collaboration for the industry:

“Scaling advanced AI models requires colossal and reliable computing. Our partnership with AWS strengthens a broad ecosystem that will enable the next era of artificial intelligence development and make it accessible to everyone.”

AWS CEO Matt Garman emphasized the company’s readiness to serve as the technological backbone for OpenAI’s ambitions:

“As OpenAI continues to push the boundaries of what is possible, AWS’s world-class infrastructure will become the backbone for their AI ambitions. The breadth and immediate availability of optimized computing demonstrate why AWS is a unique partner for supporting such large-scale workloads.”

The new infrastructure offers a highly efficient architecture with minimal latency between systems, enabling OpenAI to train next-generation models and process ChatGPT queries more effectively.

This agreement continues previous collaborations between the companies: earlier this year, OpenAI Foundation Models became available on the Amazon Bedrock platform, where thousands of AWS customers—including Peloton, Thomson Reuters, Comscore, and Verana Health—use them for automation, coding, and scientific research.

The partnership comes amid OpenAI’s rapid business growth. In October, Reuters reported that the company was considering going public with a potential valuation of up to $1 trillion, and Altman recently stated that the company’s annual revenue is well above $13 billion.

At the same time, Amazon is actively advancing automation, planning to replace more than 600,000 workers with robots to automate 75% of its operations by 2027. This strategy is expected to reduce costs and pave the way for the “robotic warehouses of the future.”

Access to AWS’s supercomputing clusters could allow OpenAI to train models not only faster but also more safely, potentially leading to AI capable of performing highly complex tasks—like fully autonomous scientific research or advanced engineering projects—that are currently considered experimental.