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Amazon Jumps 5% as OpenAI Signs $38B AWS Cloud Deal

2 min read

Nov 10, 2025 8:57:25 AM

OpenAI struck a $38 billion, seven-year partnership with Amazon Web Services, a move that immediately lifted Amazon’s stock roughly 5% and underscored the costly race to secure computing power for advanced AI. Announced on November 3, 2025, the deal gives OpenAI rapid access to AWS’s vast infrastructure to run and scale systems like ChatGPT.

Visual representation of a partnership between technology giants

What Happened

OpenAI will begin using AWS right away, tapping “hundreds of thousands” of Nvidia AI chips to train models and serve consumer and enterprise workloads, with full capacity targeted by the end of 2026 and room to expand in 2027 and beyond. The agreement follows OpenAI’s recent restructuring, which loosened earlier constraints tied to its Microsoft relationship and enabled multi-cloud partnerships. Reuters reported that Amazon shares rose about 5% and hit a record high on the news.

Why It Matters

The pact deepens AWS’s role in the AI infrastructure boom and diversifies OpenAI’s compute beyond Microsoft’s Azure. It also highlights the sector’s escalating capital needs: OpenAI has outlined massive, multi‑year compute commitments amid ambitions to scale next‑generation “frontier” models. For Amazon, the deal is a marquee validation of AWS’s ability to deliver state-of-the-art clusters at scale, directly addressing investor concerns about competition from Microsoft and Google in AI cloud services. Amazon shares hit a record high on the announcement, reflecting optimism that AI infrastructure demand will drive growth.

Background

The announcement came less than a week after OpenAI’s governance and partnership changes that removed Microsoft’s right of first refusal on new cloud deals, paving the way for the AWS agreement. Financial Times reporting noted the arrangement reduces OpenAI’s reliance on Microsoft and fits into a broader mosaic of commitments with chipmakers and cloud providers as the company chases unprecedented compute capacity.

Market Reaction And Next Steps

Investors cheered the tie‑up: Amazon’s rally added tens of billions in market value as traders bet that AI demand will translate into durable, high‑margin cloud revenue. The near‑term focus now turns to execution—how fast AWS can stand up the promised capacity and how efficiently OpenAI can deploy it. The companies say OpenAI’s workloads are already running on AWS, with additional scale coming online through 2026. The broader question, flagged by multiple outlets, is sustainability: whether OpenAI’s rapid revenue growth can keep pace with its vast infrastructure obligations over the next several years.