The new AWS partnership signals a multi-cloud future for OpenAI, balancing its legacy ties with Microsoft including the revenue sharing agreement.
Today, OpenAI announced a $110B funding round at a $730B pre-money valuation. Amazon invested $50B, while Nvidia and SoftBank invested $30B each. As part of Amazon’s investment, OpenAI is moving away from Azure as its primary cloud infrastructure provider.
Under the new partnership, AWS and OpenAI will co-create a Stateful Runtime Environment powered by OpenAI models. This environment will be offered through Amazon Bedrock, enabling developers and enterprises to build generative AI applications and agents.
AWS will also become the exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider for OpenAI Frontier, the enterprise platform OpenAI announced last month for building, deploying, and managing AI agents within organizations. OpenAI will start using AWS Trainium chips to support the Stateful Runtime Environment, Frontier, and other AI workloads. In addition, OpenAI and Amazon will develop customized models for Amazon consumer products, including Alexa.
To clarify that OpenAI’s existing partnership with Microsoft remains unchanged from what was announced in October, both companies also posted a joint statement today outlining key details:
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Microsoft and OpenAI continue to work closely across research, engineering, and product development.
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Microsoft maintains its exclusive license and access to intellectual property across OpenAI models and products.
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Microsoft and OpenAI’s commercial and revenue-share relationship remains unchanged. Consequently, OpenAI’s revenue generated through the AWS partnership will also be shared with Microsoft.
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Azure remains the exclusive cloud provider of stateless OpenAI APIs. Even if a product or service developed by OpenAI and AWS needs to make stateless API calls to OpenAI models, those calls will be hosted on Azure.
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OpenAI’s first-party products, including Frontier, will continue to be hosted on Azure. However, Microsoft will not be able to sell Frontier to other enterprises and developers directly, as AWS has secured those exclusive rights.
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The AGI definition and processes are unchanged.
“The partnership was designed to give Microsoft and OpenAI room to pursue new opportunities independently, while continuing to collaborate, which each company is doing, together and independently,” Microsoft and OpenAI said in the joint statement.