OpenAI struck a $38 billion cloud deal with AWS, sending Amazon shares up about 5% as investors cheered a fresh vote of confidence in the company’s cloud dominance and the AI boom powering it.
On November 3, 2025, Amazon Web Services and OpenAI announced a multi-year agreement that will let the ChatGPT maker run and scale its core AI workloads on AWS starting immediately. The seven-year commitment gives OpenAI access to hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GPUs—including GB200 and GB300 accelerators—via Amazon EC2 UltraServers, with all planned capacity targeted to be online by the end of 2026 and room to expand into 2027 and beyond. Amazon’s stock climbed roughly 5% and touched an all-time high following the news.
The pact bolsters AWS at a pivotal moment in the cloud race. Microsoft’s Azure has benefited from its deep ties to OpenAI, while Google has courted frontier-model providers with custom chips and data-center scale. Bringing OpenAI onto AWS signals that the biggest AI customers will likely diversify across multiple clouds as they chase massive, reliable compute. For Amazon, a marquee, seven-year customer commitment is a strong endorsement of its infrastructure and helps counter the narrative that it’s ceding AI ground to rivals.
The deal follows OpenAI’s recent restructuring, which increased its operational flexibility and ended Microsoft’s first right to supply cloud resources—clearing the way for partnerships beyond Azure. It also lands as demand for compute explodes across training and inference: from pushing new frontier models to serving everyday queries in ChatGPT. AWS, already the primary cloud provider to Anthropic, is positioning its scale, performance, and security as the draw for AI heavyweights.
OpenAI will begin using AWS immediately, with capacity ramping through 2026. Watch for how quickly workloads shift and whether AWS’s new clusters translate into lower latency and better reliability for OpenAI’s products. Also on investors’ radar: whether the partnership spurs more multi-cloud deals among frontier-model developers—and how it influences chip supply, energy use, and data-center buildouts. For Amazon, sustaining momentum in AWS will be key as enterprises and AI startups alike weigh cost, performance, and optionality in a competitive market. Amazon’s shares rose about 5% on the announcement, underscoring those expectations.