The announcement comes less than week after Amazon laid off 14,000 people.
OpenAI has signed a new deal valued at $38bn with Amazon that will allow the artificial intelligence giant to run AI workloads across Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure.
The seven-year deal announced on Monday is the first big AI push for the e-commerce giant after a restructuring last week.
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The new deal will give the ChatGPT maker access to thousands of Nvidia graphics processors to train and run its artificial intelligence models.
Experts say this does not mean that it will allow OpenAI to train its model on websites hosted by AWS – which includes the websites of The New York Times, Reddit and United Airlines.
“Running OpenAI training inside AWS doesn’t change their ability to scrape content from AWS-hosted websites [which they could already do for anything publicly readable]. This is strictly speaking about the economics of rent vs buy for GPU [graphics processing unit] capacity,” Joshua McKenty, CEO of the AI detection company PolyguardAI, told Al Jazeera.
The deal is also a major vote of confidence for the e-commerce giant’s cloud unit, AWS, which some investors feared had fallen behind rivals Microsoft and Google in the artificial intelligence (AI) race. Those fears were somewhat eased by the strong growth the business reported in the September quarter.
OpenAI will begin using AWS immediately, with all planned capacity set to come online by the end of 2026 and room to expand further in 2027 and beyond.
Amazon plans to roll out hundreds of thousands of chips, including Nvidia’s GB200 and GB300 AI accelerators, in data clusters built to power ChatGPT’s responses and train OpenAI’s next wave of models, the companies said.
Amazon already offers OpenAI models on Amazon Bedrock, which offers multiple AI models for businesses using AWS.
OpenAI’s sweeping restructuring last week moved it further away from its non-profit roots and also removed Microsoft’s first right to refusal to supply services in the new arrangement.
Image hurdles
Amazon’s announcement about an investment in AI comes only days after the company laid off 14,000 people despite CEO Andy Jassy’s comment in an earnings call on Thursday saying the layoffs were not driven by AI.
“The announcement that we made a few days ago was not really financially driven, and it’s not even really AI-driven, not right now at least,” Jassy said.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said the startup is committed to spending $1.4 trillion to develop 30 gigawatts of computing resources – enough to roughly power 25 million United States homes.
“Scaling frontier AI requires massive, reliable compute,” said Altman. “Our partnership with AWS strengthens the broad compute ecosystem that will power this next era and bring advanced AI to everyone.”
This comes amid growing concerns about the sheer amount of energy demand that AI data centres need to operate. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimates that AI data centres will use up to 12 percent of US electricity by 2028.
An AP/NORC poll from October found that 41 percent of Americans are extremely concerned about AI’s impact on the environment, while another 30 percent say they are somewhat concerned as the industry increases its data centre footprint around the US.
Signs of a bubble
Surging valuations of AI companies and their massive spending commitments, which total more than $1 trillion for OpenAI, have raised fears that the AI boom may be turning into a bubble.
OpenAI has already tapped Alphabet’s Google to supply it with cloud services, as Reuters reported in June. It also reportedly struck a deal to buy $300bn in computing power for about five years.
While OpenAI’s relationship with Microsoft, which the two forged in 2019, has helped push Microsoft to the top spot among its Big Tech peers in the AI race, both companies have been making moves recently to reduce reliance on each other.
Neither OpenAI nor Amazon were immediately available for comment.
On Wall Street, Amazon’s stock is surging on the news of the new deal. As of 11:15am in New York (16:15 GMT), it is up by 4.7 percent.