Amazon in talks to invest $10 billion in OpenAI

Amazon and OpenAI are reportedly in talks about an investment worth over $10 billion, which would make AWS not only a compute provider for OpenAI but a major shareholder, another sign OpenAI is building a multi-cloud strategy to avoid relying solely on Microsoft.

These talks were first reported by The Information and picked up by The Guardian. Sources have described the negotiations as “very fluid,” with a possible valuation over $500 billion, while Bloomberg reports the figure could be even higher.

The need is urgent. OpenAI rolled out GPT-5.2 on December 11, 2025, following CEO Sam Altman’s “code red” alert inside the company to speed up development in response to Google’s Gemini 3. If OpenAI is planning such a rapid product pipeline, it clearly needs a large pool of funding to secure time, talent, and, most importantly, compute resources.

This capital is the essential bridge to OpenAI’s next phase: moving from a chatbot into an “agentic” workforce—AI systems that can execute multi-step tasks, not just generate text. OpenAI has increasingly focused on “work” outcomes, automation that completes multi-step tasks rather than just generating text. And it claims that enterprise users are already saving 40–60 minutes a day on average. Sustaining those productivity gains requires a massive infrastructure expansion that the Amazon deal is designed to bankroll.

The Compute Supply Chain

This is more than "Amazon money." This is about ensuring the compute supply chain for model deployment in a world where Nvidia GPUs are even rarer and costlier than the capital itself, and where being tied to one cloud vendor is becoming a strategic risk. The point is a hedge against both a single-cloud dependency and a single-hardware bottleneck.

It also involves Trainium, Amazon’s in-house AI chip used to train and run large models at scale, offering an alternative path to Nvidia-heavy stacks. In the reported deal structure, OpenAI would expand its usage of Trainium as part of the overall relationship.

The investment talks build on the existing infrastructure deal between OpenAI and AWS, a multi-year partnership announced earlier that OpenAI valued at $38 billion over seven years.

But AWS isn’t the only non-Azure player in the equation. OpenAI has also developed extensive capacity with Oracle via the Stargate expansion initiative, a partnership OpenAI said is worth over $300 billion over five years. This third party makes the “multi-cloud” strategy more than a talking point.

Why Microsoft still matters

Even if a check for $10B is signed by Amazon, Microsoft remains a key limiting factor. Microsoft currently owns a 27% stake in OpenAI and has exclusive rights to sell OpenAI models through its cloud services, meaning an Amazon investment does not automatically make AWS the primary place where companies access OpenAI’s advanced models, Reuters reported.

That’s the friction point: OpenAI wants infrastructure diversity and leverage, while Microsoft wants to maintain Azure as the default entry point for OpenAI. A big AWS investment could increase that tension and push the definition of what a partnership is when cloud providers are also investors.

OpenAI’s own finances explain this push. The company reportedly generated $4.3 billion in the first half of 2025 and is targeting $13 billion for the year, while burning billions in cash, according to Reuters. Separately, OpenAI said more than one million organizations are now using its tech for enterprise use cases.

Should the Amazon talks become a deal, the announcement will be about more than the money changing hands. It will signal that OpenAI is willing to bring several infrastructure giants into its orbit to keep moving fast—while working through the complex reality that Microsoft still holds important distribution rights.