This story was originally published on MyNorthwest.com.
Amazon is investing $50 billion in OpenAI as part of a new partnership the two companies are launching.
With this partnership, Amazon Web Services will now be the exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider for “OpenAI Frontier” — a platform that enables organizations to build, deploy, and manage teams of AI agents.
“Frontier enables organizations to build, deploy, and manage teams of AI agents that operate across real business systems with shared context, built-in governance, and enterprise-grade security, without managing underlying infrastructure,” Amazon wrote. “As companies move from experimentation to production AI, Frontier makes it straightforward to integrate powerful AI into existing workflows quickly, securely, and at global scale.”
According to Reuters, Amazon will start with an initial $15 billion investment, followed by another $35 billion in the coming months upon meeting certain conditions.
“We have lots of developers and companies eager to run services powered by OpenAI models on AWS, and our unique collaboration with OpenAI to provide stateful runtime environments will change what’s possible for customers building AI apps and agents,” Andy Jassy, President and CEO of Amazon, stated. “We continue to be impressed with what OpenAI is building, and we’re excited not only about their choosing to go big on our custom AI silicon (Trainium), but also our opportunity to invest in the company and partnership over the long term.”
Both companies believe this expansion could reduce costs because of data efficiency.
“OpenAI and Amazon share a belief that AI should show up in ways that are practical and genuinely useful for people,” Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, said. “Combining OpenAI’s models with Amazon’s infrastructure and global reach helps us put powerful AI into the hands of businesses and users at real scale.”
OpenAI now worth $840 billion
Amazon was just part of OpenAI’s fundraising. OpenAI announced Friday that it raised $110 billion, with $30 billion from SoftBank and $30 billion from Nvidia, in addition to $50 billion from Amazon.
With this round of funding, OpenAI is now valued at approximately $840 billion.
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