Amazon and global investors pour $110 billion into OpenAI

Yesterday 14:40

By: Dakir Madiha

Amazon and global investors pour $110 billion into OpenAI

OpenAI has secured a record breaking 110 billion dollars in new funding, more than doubling the size of its previous capital raise and cementing its position at the center of the artificial intelligence race. The deal values the ChatGPT maker at 730 billion dollars before the new money, placing it among the world’s most valuable private technology companies. Amazon is committing 50 billion dollars to the round, while Nvidia and SoftBank are each investing 30 billion dollars, with OpenAI indicating that additional financial investors are expected to join over time.

The funding is closely tied to a sweeping expansion of OpenAI’s commercial and infrastructure partnerships. Amazon Web Services will become the exclusive external cloud distribution provider for OpenAI’s Frontier enterprise platform, giving AWS customers access to OpenAI models to build and deploy generative AI systems at scale. OpenAI and Amazon will also co develop a so called stateful runtime environment for AI agents on Amazon Bedrock and work together on custom models that power Amazon’s customer facing applications. As part of the agreement, OpenAI is expanding an existing 38 billion dollar cloud deal with Amazon by 100 billion dollars over eight years and has committed to consume about 2 gigawatts of Amazon’s Trainium compute capacity, covering current Trainium3 chips and the forthcoming Trainium4 generation.

The partnership is notable because Amazon already serves as Anthropic’s main cloud and training partner and has invested up to 8 billion dollars in that rival AI startup, underscoring how large technology groups are hedging their bets across multiple frontier model developers. For OpenAI, the expanded reliance on Amazon’s infrastructure sits alongside deepening ties with Nvidia, which will provide gigawatts of dedicated compute for both training and inference under a separate collaboration. Nvidia’s 30 billion dollar equity investment replaces an earlier letter of intent that had linked funding to a planned 10 gigawatt hardware deployment, a structure that was never finalized.

SoftBank is matching Nvidia’s 30 billion dollar commitment through its Vision Fund, further increasing its exposure to OpenAI after years of backing large scale technology bets. The new round comes as OpenAI reports rapid user and revenue growth from ChatGPT, including hundreds of millions of weekly active users and tens of millions of paying subscribers on its consumer offerings, alongside rising demand from enterprises. To support that expansion, OpenAI has told investors it now expects roughly 600 billion dollars in cumulative compute spending by 2030, a more targeted plan after earlier internal projections discussed infrastructure investments of up to 1.4 trillion dollars.

OpenAI and its backers frame the latest capital infusion as necessary to secure long term access to advanced chips, energy, and data center capacity at a time when demand for generative AI services is surging worldwide. By tying equity stakes to multi year cloud and hardware agreements, the companies aim to lock in resources and pricing while bringing frontier AI models into everyday use for businesses, developers, and consumers.