Amazon is reportedly in talks to invest up to $10 billion in OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company behind ChatGPT. The move could push the company’s value to more than $500 billion and further intensify competition in the global AI market.
The talks, first reported by The Information and subsequently confirmed by multiple sources, are said to be at an early and fluid stage. News of the potential deal sent Amazon shares up about 0.6 percent, reflecting investor optimism about the deepening relationship between the world’s largest cloud provider and one of the most influential AI developers.
As part of the planned investment, OpenAI is expected to increase its use of Amazon’s Trainium AI accelerator chips, which are designed to compete with Nvidia’s dominant processors and similar offerings from Google. The deal could also lay the foundation for a broader fundraising round with additional investors.
The discussions come as OpenAI explores longer-term capital options, including a possible initial public offering that could value the company at up to $1 trillion. The rapid expansion of generative AI has created extraordinary demand for computing power and placed cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) at the center of the technology’s growth.
Amazon and OpenAI already have an extensive business relationship. Last month, OpenAI agreed to a $38 billion, multi-year deal to buy cloud services from AWS, primarily to run its AI workloads using Nvidia chips. The companies described the agreement as a strategic partnership aimed at supporting OpenAI’s rapidly growing computing needs.
OpenAI has also secured a number of other landmark infrastructure contracts. In September, the company announced an agreement with Nvidia to build and operate AI data centers with a capacity of at least 10 gigawatts. Nvidia committed to investing up to $100 billion as capacity is expanded. Separately, OpenAI has a cloud partnership with Oracle that could be worth up to $300 billion over time.
OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit research organization in 2015 and rose to global prominence after launching ChatGPT in 2022, which helped bring artificial intelligence into the mainstream. Earlier this year, the company completed a major restructuring that transformed it into a nonprofit corporation. The new structure, overseen by a non-profit organization with financial stake, is designed to remove restrictions on OpenAI’s ability to raise capital and secure the massive computing resources needed to train and run advanced AI models.
For Amazon, a significant equity investment in OpenAI would strengthen its position in the intensifying battle for AI leadership while helping to accelerate the adoption of its in-house Trainium chips and AWS infrastructure. If completed, the deal would be one of the largest strategic investments in generative AI to date and underscores how central artificial intelligence has become to the future of global technology and cloud computing.
