Amazon shares jumped after a marquee customer arrived. OpenAI signed a multi‑year, $38 billion agreement to run and scale its core AI workloads on Amazon Web Services, sending Amazon’s stock up roughly 5% to a record on November 3, 2025.
OpenAI and AWS unveiled a seven‑year partnership that gives the ChatGPT maker immediate access to AWS’s infrastructure, including hundreds of thousands of Nvidia chips, with room to grow into tens of millions of CPUs. The companies said capacity will ramp quickly, with most of the buildout slated to be available by the end of 2026 and flexibility to expand beyond that. The deal represents a $38 billion commitment by OpenAI to AWS for training new models, handling ChatGPT traffic, and supporting more “agentic” AI systems that autonomously complete tasks. All planned capacity is targeted by the end of 2026, according to the companies.
The agreement is a significant endorsement of AWS’s position in the AI compute race after investor concerns that rivals Microsoft and Google had seized the early momentum. It also reflects OpenAI’s drive to diversify its cloud footprint following a restructuring that ended Microsoft’s first right of refusal on compute. Investors cheered the development: Amazon shares closed up about 5% on November 3, 2025, as major indexes also climbed on AI enthusiasm.
Frontier AI research has become a battle for compute at unprecedented scale. Reuters has reported that OpenAI, while deepening ties with AWS, has also lined up massive, multi‑year commitments with other providers — including a new Azure pact with Microsoft and a separate infrastructure deal with Oracle — underscoring a strategy to secure capacity across the industry. For AWS, landing OpenAI adds a marquee workload to complement efforts ranging from its in‑house Trainium chips to new large‑scale data center projects, reinforcing confidence that Amazon’s cloud unit can compete at the top tier of AI demand.
In the near term, watch for how quickly AWS deploys the promised clusters and how much of OpenAI’s inference and training traffic migrates. Over the next year, investors will parse Amazon’s disclosures for signs the contract flows into AWS backlog and revenue, and whether margin trends hold as capital spending rises to meet AI demand. For OpenAI, the breadth of providers — and how effectively it orchestrates them — will shape the pace of model upgrades and new features for consumers and enterprises alike.