According to Silicon Republic, OpenAI just signed a massive $38 billion deal with Amazon Web Services that gives them immediate access to AWS’s compute infrastructure. The seven-year partnership provides OpenAI with “hundreds of thousands” of Nvidia GPUs and potential expansion to “tens of millions” of CPUs. This comes right after OpenAI restructured its corporate setup and confirmed a $500 billion valuation, with CEO Sam Altman revealing they’ve already spent around $1 trillion on infrastructure.
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The compute arms race is getting ridiculous
Here’s the thing – when you’re talking about hundreds of thousands of Nvidia chips, we’re not just discussing some casual cloud hosting. We’re talking about entire data centers essentially dedicated to OpenAI’s training workloads. And the fact that they have expansion options to tens of millions of CPUs? That’s absolutely wild scaling for what they’re calling “agentic workloads.”
But what’s really interesting is how this fits into OpenAI’s multi-cloud strategy. They’re already using Microsoft Azure (their primary investor), Google Cloud, Oracle, and CoreWeave. So why add AWS to the mix? Basically, they’re playing the field to avoid vendor lock-in and ensure they can scale wherever capacity becomes available. It’s like they’re collecting cloud providers like Pokémon cards.
The technical realities behind the headlines
When AWS mentions their clusters consist of Nvidia GB200s and GB300s, we’re looking at some of the most advanced AI training hardware available. These aren’t your grandma’s GPUs – they’re specifically designed for massive parallel processing of AI models. The GB200 series represents Nvidia’s latest architecture with significantly improved memory bandwidth and compute density.
Now, here’s a question worth asking: How reliable is this infrastructure really? Because AWS had that major outage just last month that took down banks and government websites. When you’re running trillion-dollar AI training jobs, even a few hours of downtime can cost millions. So while AWS talks about “best-in-class infrastructure,” recent history suggests there might be some wrinkles to iron out.
The bigger financial picture
Let’s talk numbers for a second. A $38 billion cloud commitment over seven years works out to roughly $5.4 billion per year. That’s more than many companies’ entire market cap. And when you combine that with their existing spending across other cloud providers, you start to understand why Altman is talking about that $1 trillion infrastructure number.
This deal also comes at a fascinating time for OpenAI’s corporate structure. They just reorganized, giving significant stakes to both their nonprofit arm and Microsoft. And with Reuters reporting IPO preparations that could value them at $1 trillion, every move they make is essentially setting the stage for their public market debut. The AWS partnership isn’t just about compute – it’s about building credibility and demonstrating they have the infrastructure to dominate AI for years to come.
