Negotiations are underway between OpenAI, a leading name in the artificial intelligence world, and e-commerce and cloud computing giant Amazon for a massive investment and strategic collaboration package expected to exceed $10 billion. Sources, who declined to be named due to the confidentiality of the process, stated that the talks are not yet finalized and the terms may change.
A massive collaboration between Amazon and OpenAI
This potential partnership follows OpenAI’s restructuring completed in October. With this structural change, the company has eased its dependence on its main partner, Microsoft, gaining the opportunity to collaborate with different giants in the technology ecosystem. While Microsoft’s $13 billion support to OpenAI since 2019 continues, OpenAI is diversifying its financial and technical resources in this new phase.
For Amazon, this move adds a new dimension to the race for dominance in the artificial intelligence field. The company has already invested $8 billion in Anthropic, one of OpenAI’s strongest competitors.
However, Amazon’s strategy to increase its influence in the sector includes this new agreement with OpenAI. The market activity isn’t limited to these two names; last month, Microsoft announced it would invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic, while Nvidia also decided to provide $10 billion in support to the same initiative. These cross-investments between tech giants demonstrate how fierce the global competition for artificial intelligence infrastructure has become.
One of the most critical points of the negotiations is Amazon’s in-house developed AI chips. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has reached a significant milestone in its hardware solutions, which it has been working on since 2015.
Following the Inferentia chips introduced in 2018, the company unveiled its latest generation Trainium chips earlier this month. The use of these hardware chips, vital for training large language models and handling massive computational loads, forms the basis of the negotiations with OpenAI. OpenAI plans to integrate AWS hardware into its system to meet its increasing processing power needs.
