What to know

  • Amazon is in preliminary discussions to invest a reported minimum of $10 billion in OpenAI, potentially valuing the ChatGPT maker at more than $500 billion.​
  • The talks are linked to OpenAI expanding use of Amazon Web Services and adopting AWS’s Trainium accelerators for training and serving some frontier AI models.​
  • Any agreement would add a powerful new cloud and chip partner alongside Microsoft and Nvidia, reinforcing OpenAI’s multi‑vendor strategy for compute.​

OpenAI is in early talks with Amazon about a potential investment of at least $10 billion that would see the AI company run future models on Amazon’s in‑house Trainium chips via AWS. If completed, the deal could value OpenAI at more than $500 billion and deepen competition in the cloud and AI chip markets.

Though no final agreement has been signed and the figures remain fluid, a central element of the conversations is a commitment for OpenAI to use Amazon’s in‑house AI accelerators, especially its second‑generation Trainium chips, alongside AWS cloud infrastructure. Trainium is designed for large‑scale training of AI models that is a cost-and energy-efficient alternative to Nvidia’s GPUs and Google’s custom TPUs.​

While Nvidia remains the benchmark for cutting‑edge AI training hardware, global demand for GPUs creates bottlenecks for companies like OpenAI. With Trainium and related AWS offerings, OpenAI could access more dedicated hardware pools, trading a small amount of peak performance for better availability, pricing, and closer alignment with Amazon.

But having garnered investments from such luminaries as Microsoft, Nvidia, and Disney, another big link to OpenAI's already circular investment could enflame the fears of a growing bubble.