Amazon, NVIDIA and the US$110bn Show of Faith in OpenAI

OpenAI's bid to "scale AI for everyone" just went up a notch. 

The trailblazing start-up has just secured a US$110bn investment consisting of US$30bn from SoftBank, US$30bn from NVIDIA and US$50bn from Amazon, taking its pre-money valuation to US$730bn. 

At the same time, OpenAI has signed a strategic partnership with Amazon and secured next-generation inference compute with NVIDIA. The agreements are focused on compute, distribution and capital, three elements OpenAI identifies as essential to meet growing demand across consumers, developers and businesses.

Sam Altman, Co-Founder and CEO of OpenAI, says: “We’re pushing the frontier across infrastructure, research and products to make AI more capable, reliable and broadly useful.

"SoftBank, NVIDIA and Amazon are long-term partners who share our ambition to turn real scientific progress into systems that deliver meaningful benefits for people at global scale. Building AI that works for everyone will require deep collaboration across the stack and we’re excited to do this together.”

Scaling products from Codex to ChatGPT

OpenAI points to product growth as evidence of its scale. Codex, its software engineering model, brings what it describes as the power of a top engineer to anyone building software.

Weekly Codex users have more than tripled since the start of the year to 1.6 million, with individuals now creating, automating and shipping software that once required a full engineering team.

More than nine million paying business users rely on ChatGPT at work, while start-ups, enterprises and governments are building on the OpenAI platform to redesign how products and services are created and delivered. Teams often begin with individual productivity before scaling across engineering, support, finance, sales and operations.

What's more, as frontier AI shifts from research to everyday global deployment, OpenAI's Frontier platform is enabling organisations to build, deploy and manage AI co-workers at enterprise scale.

OpenAI's latest valuation lifts the OpenAI Foundation’s stake in OpenAI Group to more than US$180bn, strengthening one of the world’s best-resourced non-profits and expanding its ability to fund work in areas such as health and AI resilience.

Inside the Amazon partnership

OpenAI and Amazon's multi-year strategic partnership is aimed at accelerating AI innovation for enterprises, start-ups and end consumers worldwide.

Amazon's US$50bn investment begins with an initial US$15bn, which is to be followed by US$35bn in the coming months when certain conditions are met.

"OpenAI and Amazon share a belief that AI should show up in ways that are practical and genuinely useful for people," explains Sam Altman, Co-Founder and CEO at OpenAI. "Combining OpenAI’s intelligence with Amazon’s infrastructure and global reach helps us put powerful AI into the hands of businesses and users at real scale."

A core element of the partnership is the joint development of a stateful runtime environment powered by OpenAI’s models, available through Amazon Bedrock.

A stateful runtime environment allows AI to retain context over time, meaning developers can keep track of prior interactions, access memory, use identity systems and connect to compute resources without losing continuity between tasks.

Environments are set to be trained to run on AWS infrastructure and integrate with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and other infrastructure services. The goal is for AI applications and agents to run cohesively alongside other applications operating in AWS.

Further elements of the strategic partnership include:

• AWS has become the exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider for OpenAI Frontier, expanding access to OpenAI’s enterprise platform as demand for AI deployment grows across industries. Frontier allows companies to integrate AI into existing workflows without managing underlying infrastructure.
• OpenAI and AWS have expanded their existing US$38bn multi-year agreement by a further US$100bn over eight years. OpenAI will use around two gigawatts of AWS Trainium capacity, spanning Trainium3 and next-generation Trainium4 chips. Trainium4, due from 2027, will deliver stronger FP4 performance and significantly greater memory bandwidth and capacity.

Andy Jassy, President and CEO of Amazon, adds: “We have lots of developers and companies eager to run services powered by OpenAI models on AWS, and our unique collaboration with OpenAI to provide stateful runtime environments will change what’s possible for customers building AI apps and agents.

"We continue to be impressed with what OpenAI is building and we're excited not only about their choosing to go big on our custom AI silicon (Trainium), but also our opportunity to invest in the company and partnership over the long-term."

Deepening collaboration with NVIDIA

OpenAI has also expanded its long standing collaboration with NVIDIA.

The agreement includes three gigawatts of dedicated inference capacity and two gigawatts of training on Vera Rubin systems, building on Hopper and Blackwell systems already in operation across Microsoft, OCI and CoreWeave.

Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO of NVIDIA, comments: "Artificial intelligence is the most consequential technology of our time and OpenAI is at the forefront.

"We have been privileged to partner with OpenAI since its earliest days, as it delivered one breakthrough after another. Together, we will continue to push the frontier – building the infrastructure for the age of AI and scaling its benefits to serve industries and societies worldwide."

Thanks to significant capital injection and infrastructure expansion, OpenAI finds itself well placed to train and deploy frontier models at global scale. The foundations are being laid for meeting demand, extending access and embedding AI systems across industries and communities worldwide.