Move in line with existing multi-billion dollar interest in competitor Anthropic
Trade
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OpenAI is in talks with Amazon about a potential investment of more than $10 billion dollars (around €8.5 billion). This news follows OpenAI’s restructuring in October, which gave the company more flexibility to raise funds and work with various players in the artificial intelligence (AI) sector.
Previously, Microsoft held exclusive rights as OpenAI’s primary IT provider thanks to its substantial investment of more than $13 billion (around €11.1 billion) since 2019. That exclusivity has now been lifted, allowing OpenAI to explore partnerships with other entities.
Amazon’s interest in OpenAI is in line with its current investment of at least $8 billion (around €6.8 billion) in Anthropic, a rival in the generative AI space. This move suggests Amazon’s ambition to gain a stronger foothold in the fast-growing market for generative AI technologies.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing arm, has been developing its own AI chips since 2015. These chips, including the Inferentia and Trainium series, play a crucial role in training AI models and meeting the growing demand for computing power.
OpenAI has recently made significant infrastructure commitments worth more than $1.4 trillion (around €1.2 trillion). These agreements include partnerships with chipmakers such as Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices and Broadcom. Most notably, OpenAI signed its first contract with AWS last month, securing $38 billion (around €32.4 billion) in cloud computing capacity.
In October, OpenAI successfully completed a secondary share sale worth $6.6 billion (around €5.6 billion), allowing current and former employees to sell their shares at an impressive valuation of $500 billion (around €426.7 billion).
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