OpenAI has signed a seven-year, $38 billion agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing subsidiary, to secure additional infrastructure for artificial intelligence (AI) development, a move widely seen as an effort to reduce its dependence on Microsoft.
According to the announcement, the global artificial intelligence giant will immediately begin using hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GPUs located in the United States, with plans to expand capacity in the coming years. Following the news, Amazon’s stock rose by about 5%.
The first phase of the deal will utilize AWS’s existing data centers, while Amazon will eventually build additional infrastructure specifically for OpenAI.
“This is a completely separate capacity that we’re providing,” said Dave Brown, Vice President of Compute and Machine Learning Services at AWS, in an interview. “Part of that capacity is already online, and OpenAI is taking advantage of it.”
The top artificial intelligence organization has recently entered into a series of major deals worth around $1.54 trillion with Nvidia, Oracle, Google, and Samsung.
These agreements involve total planned expenditures of approximately $1.5 trillion on computing resources, though the payments are structured to occur gradually as new capacity comes online.
CEO Sam Altman has stated that his goal is to add 1 gigawatt of new power capacity every week by 2030, roughly equivalent to the output of a nuclear power plant.
Until this year, OpenAI had an exclusive cloud partnership with Microsoft, which first backed the company in 2019 and has invested a total of $13 billion to date.
