US: OpenAI has entered into a $38bn agreement with Amazon to run its future artificial intelligence systems on Amazon Web Services, giving the ChatGPT developer access to massive computing power as global demand for AI grows.
The seven-year deal is one of the biggest cloud partnerships in the industry. It will allow OpenAI to use thousands of Nvidia graphics processors hosted by AWS to train and operate its models. OpenAI will begin shifting workloads to Amazon’s cloud immediately, with all planned capacity expected to be ready by the end of 2026 and room to scale further in 2027.
The partnership comes at a crucial moment for Amazon, which has been working to show investors that it is staying competitive in the AI race against Microsoft and Google. AWS posted strong growth last quarter, but concerns had surfaced that its rivals were moving faster on AI.
Amazon says it will deploy large clusters of advanced Nvidia chips, including the latest GB200 and GB300 units, to support OpenAI’s expanding computing needs. These data centres will help power ChatGPT and future OpenAI products.
Analysts stress the deal does not give OpenAI access to information on AWS-hosted websites. They say the agreement is focused solely on cloud infrastructure and computing power, not data for training models.
.@awscloud and @OpenAI just announced a multi-year, strategic partnership that provides AWS’s world-class infrastructure for OpenAI’s advanced AI workloads. The compute clusters are designed to support various workloads, from serving inference for ChatGPT to training next…
— Amazon (@amazon) November 3, 2025
The announcement follows major restructuring at OpenAI last week, which shifted the company further from its non-profit origins and loosened earlier ties with Microsoft. OpenAI already uses Google’s cloud services for part of its infrastructure and continues to partner with Microsoft, which remains a key investor.
The scale of the agreement also highlights growing concerns about energy consumption in the AI industry. US research suggests AI data centres could use up to 12 percent of the country’s electricity supply by 2028.
Public worries about environmental impact are rising as tech companies race to build larger computing hubs. Meanwhile, Amazon recently cut about 14,000 jobs, though the company maintains the layoffs were not driven by AI.
