SAN FRANCISCO — Amazon moved quickly Tuesday to capitalize on OpenAI’s new relationship status with Microsoft, launching a preview of OpenAI’s models on its Bedrock platform less than 24 hours after the ChatGPT maker was freed from its previously exclusive cloud arrangement.
The companies described the news as meeting years of customer demand.
“Their production applications run in AWS. Their data is in AWS. They trust the security of AWS, and we’ve forced them for the last couple of years, to get great OpenAI models, to go to other places,” AWS CEO Matt Garman said at an event in San Francisco.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman appeared at the event via recorded video, noting that his “schedule got taken away” from him for the day, an apparent allusion to the opening of the trial in Elon Musk’s lawsuit against him and OpenAI in nearby Oakland.
“The opportunity ahead of us is enormous, and the most exciting part is that this is not something in the future — it’s starting right now,” Altman said in the video.
Altman also said OpenAI’s Codex coding tool will be available to AWS customers, and the companies unveiled Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents, powered by OpenAI — the product name for the enterprise agent platform previously described as a “Stateful Runtime Environment” when the two companies announced their partnership in February.
Denise Dresser, OpenAI’s chief revenue officer, said the hundreds of enterprise customers she has met since joining the company four months ago are past the experimentation phase with AI.
“They understand that to do that, they need to have powerful models. But even more importantly, they want those models in a trusted environment that they know and a trusted infrastructure. And so for me, that’s what’s so special about this partnership,” Dresser said.
It has been a whirlwind couple of months for both companies.
Amazon and OpenAI struck a $50 billion investment and cloud deal in February, with OpenAI committing to run workloads on Amazon’s custom Trainium chips and the two companies agreeing to co-build what they called a “Stateful Runtime Environment” on Amazon’s Bedrock platform. The cloud agreement alone is worth more than $100 billion over eight years.
An internal OpenAI memo that surfaced in April touted the Amazon partnership as a key enterprise growth driver. OpenAI chief revenue officer Denise Dresser wrote that the Microsoft partnership had “limited our ability to meet enterprises where they are,” adding that inbound demand for the AWS offering had been “frankly staggering.”
Amazon has also doubled down on its original AI partner, Anthropic, investing up to $25 billion and striking a similar $100 billion-plus cloud commitment in a deal announced earlier this month.
Both OpenAI and Anthropic have committed to running workloads on Amazon’s custom Trainium processors, and Facebook parent Meta recently signed a multibillion-dollar deal to use Amazon’s Graviton chips for agentic AI.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy disclosed in his annual shareholder letter that Amazon’s custom silicon business is generating more than $20 billion a year in revenue.
Things changed again for the AWS-OpenAI partnership just this week.
On Monday, Microsoft and OpenAI revamped their partnership, making OpenAI free to serve all of its products — including API-based services previously exclusive to Microsoft Azure — on any cloud provider. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy immediately signaled the impact, posting on LinkedIn that OpenAI’s models would be available soon on Amazon’s Bedrock platform.
Amazon reports first-quarter earnings Wednesday, with the company on pace to spend $200 billion this year on capital expenditures, most of it on AI infrastructure. Jassy has called AI “an extraordinarily unusual opportunity to forever change the size of AWS and Amazon as a whole.
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