OpenAI strikes $38bn computing deal with Amazon

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OpenAI has signed a $38bn deal with Amazon Web Services, the latest in a string of agreements struck by the lossmaking start-up as it races to secure computing power.

The seven-year deal, which takes OpenAI’s total recent commitments to close to $1.5tn, will allow OpenAI to make immediate use of AWS infrastructure to run its products, including ChatGPT.

The arrangement ties OpenAI more closely to Amazon, which has committed to invest $8bn in rival AI group Anthropic. It also lessens OpenAI’s dependence on Microsoft, its biggest backer, for computing power.

Amazon’s share price rose about 4 per cent in pre-market trading.

OpenAI has struck a series of massive deals this year with companies including Nvidia, AMD, Oracle, Broadcom, Google and Samsung.

These contracts commit the company to spending close to $1.5tn on computing resources, but they are structured such that OpenAI pays in increments as new power is developed and delivered.

The deals have largely been put together by a small team within OpenAI, with little input from external advisers.

The company is planning an ambitious build out of data centre infrastructure as it seeks to position itself at the centre of a nexus of companies developing the new technology.

Chief executive Sam Altman has said he wants to be able to add 1 gigawatt a week of new capacity from 2030, an amount of power roughly equivalent to the output of a nuclear power plant.

Experts question the feasibility of developing so much new capacity so quickly, as well as OpenAI’s ability to pay for it.

The company’s revenue has surged to $13bn on an annualised basis, and Altman said this week that it could hit $100bn by 2027.

But OpenAI’s voracious appetite for computing power pushed it to a loss of around $12bn in the past quarter alone, according to financial disclosures by Microsoft last week.

Altman said he was confident the company would grow to meet its commitments in an interview with investor Brad Gerstner this weekend.

“We are taking a forward bet that [revenue] is going to continue to grow and that not only will ChatGPT keep growing, but we will be able to become one of the important AI clouds, that our consumer device business will be a significant and important thing, that AI that can automate science will create huge value,” he said.

The start-up completed a long-awaited restructure last week, allowing investors to hold equity in the company for the first time and clearing the path for an initial public offering.

OpenAI has raised around $60bn to date, and executives at the company anticipate a more conventional corporate structure will make future fundraising more straightforward.

As part of the restructure, OpenAI also rewrote a contract that gave Microsoft a right of first refusal on new cloud contracts, clearing the path for the AWS deal.