OpenAI has entered into a $38 billion cloud computing deal with AWS in a deal set to extend at least seven years, the hyperscaler says. The Monday news propelled Amazon stock to an all-time high of $254 per share, up 4 percent at close. After initially working exclusively with investor Microsoft for cloud services, OpenAI has negotiated expansively to meet increased demand. This year, the startup has signed with Oracle, Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom for storage and processing power as well as funding for data center construction plans of its own, here and abroad. The strategic alliance with AWS marks OpenAI’s first such arrangement with Amazon.

While AWS is the world’s leading cloud services provider, the OpenAI agreement should do a lot to assuage Wall Street’s fears that it was losing ground to Microsoft’s Azure service as well as Google Cloud as each grows. But the overall pie seems to be enlarging without diminishing anyone’s share.

“The deal is tiny compared with those OpenAI has signed with other cloud leaders, which include a $300 billion deal with Oracle and a $250 billion commitment to Microsoft, but it represents a crucial first step in Amazon’s effort to ensure that its cloud business can benefit from a company that is pledging to spend trillions of dollars on computing power,” writes The Wall Street Journal, noting that “Amazon is under pressure from investors to accelerate the growth of its Amazon Web Services cloud business,” a goal favorably reflected in its Q3 earnings report.

AWS will “run and scale OpenAI’s core artificial intelligence workloads starting immediately,” according to the AWS announcement, which indicates “OpenAI is accessing AWS compute comprising hundreds of thousands of state-of-the-art Nvidia GPUs, with the ability to expand to tens of millions of CPUs to rapidly scale agentic workloads” tapping clusters topping 500,000 chips. The processing will involve both model training and inference for ChatGPT and other services.

All initially contracted capacity is set to be deployed by the end of 2026, with the potential to expand through 2027 and beyond, AWS says.

The New York Times reports that while OpenAI initially signed an exclusive cloud computing contract with its principal investor, Microsoft and OpenAI recently renegotiated “so that OpenAI was free to purchase services from any cloud computing company without Microsoft’s approval.”

OpenAI’s new data center build-outs with Oracle, SoftBank and the United Arab Emirates, among others, are being funded in part by chipmakers Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom, per NYT.

“The startup also has a $22.4 billion deal with CoreWeave, a leader among a new crop of so-called neoclouds pitching their services to AI developers,” Bloomberg says of OpenAI.

Related:
Jeff Bezos Becomes $10 Billion Richer As Amazon’s OpenAI Deal Boosts Stock, Forbes, 11/3/25
Does OpenAI’s $38 Billion Deal with Amazon Signal a Breakup with Microsoft?, Inc., 11/3/25