OpenAI has closed another round of funding, reporting that the company raised $110 billion. $50 billion of that is coming from Amazon, starting with an initial $15 billion and followed by another $35 billion in the coming months.
Amazon announced today that the investment is part of a strategic partnership, with the two companies jointly developing a Stateful Runtime Environment powered by OpenAI’s models, which will be available through Amazon Bedrock. This will allow developers to organize projects and work across various tools to better manage workflows. The stateful developer environments will be trained to run optimally on AWS’s infrastructure and work with other tools and resources in that ecosystem.
“OpenAI and Amazon share a belief that AI should show up in ways that are practical and genuinely useful for people,” said Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI. ”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.”
With the deal, AWS will serve as the exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider for OpenAI Frontier. Frontier allows organizations to build, customize, and implement a team of AI agents that can be integrated with existing workflows.
OpenAI and Amazon will also work together to develop models for Amazon developers to power Amazon’s customer-facing applications. Models will able to be customized to work with AI products and in tandem with models already available to developers, including Amazon Nova products, making it easier to build and improve products.
“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,” said Andy Jassy, President and CEO of Amazon. “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.”