Seven-year cloud commitment

OpenAI on Wednesday announced a seven-year agreement to buy up to $38 billion worth of cloud-computing services from Amazon Web Services, locking in the processing power it needs to keep training large AI models and run products like ChatGPT. The deal deepens a relationship that had been growing quietly for months, and it gives Amazon a marquee AI customer at a time when major cloud providers are racing to secure long-term workloads. For OpenAI, the arrangement means it can plan multi-year model upgrades—bigger context windows, more agents, more multimodal features—without worrying each quarter about GPU availability. The company said the spending will be phased, giving it flexibility if AI demand cools or if better chips arrive sooner than expected.

Competitive and regulatory implications

Analysts said the pact underscores how capital-intensive frontier AI has become and could push rivals such as Anthropic, Google and Meta to sign similarly large infrastructure commitments. Regulators in the U.S. and Europe are likely to study whether a few powerful labs tying up compute with a few cloud giants will make it harder for startups to get priority access to the latest chips. Amazon, for its part, gains a headline customer to show investors it is not ceding generative AI to Microsoft’s Azure, even though Microsoft still owns a substantial stake in OpenAI’s parent entity. The timing, as governments talk austerity while private firms pour tens of billions into AI, highlights the growing gap between public-sector digital capacity and what the top AI companies can finance.