After 30,000 layoffs, Amazon made big investment in OpenAI and called it an AI winner
Amazon has announced a massive $50 billion investment in OpenAI, making it the largest single backer in the company’s latest $110 billion funding round. As part of the deal, the e-commerce and cloud giant will deepen its AI collaboration with OpenAI, expand cloud infrastructure and develop new AI models.
Amazon is investing $50 billion in OpenAI as part of its latest multi-year strategic partnership to build the next generation of artificial intelligence infrastructure and enterprise tools. The deal also puts Amazon as the biggest backer in OpenAI’s latest $110 billion funding round, which also includes a $30 billion investment from SoftBank, $30 billion from Nvidia.
Amazon will invest in OpenAI in phases, beginning with an initial investment of $15 billion, followed by a further $35 billion subject to certain conditions. The announcement comes just weeks after Amazon completed 30,000 layoffs across multiple divisions in a strategic shift aimed at reducing bureaucracy, flattening organizational structures and reallocating resources towards artificial intelligence (AI).
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The latest funding round, which includes big backers like Amazon, SoftBank and Nvidia, reportedly values OpenAI at a pre-money valuation of $730 billion, a sharp increase from its $300 billion valuation in March 2025. The investment surge is one of the largest private technology funding rounds to date, with Nvidia and SoftBank among other major backers pledging $30 billion.
When announcing the partnership, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy praised OpenAI as a highly talented team with strong products, and said he sees it emerging as one of the big winners in the AI race.
“We are excited about our investment in OpenAI – they are an extremely talented team with great products, IP, and vision for how they can continue to serve customers and enterprises. We think they will be one of the big winners in AI, we can help them grow, and we believe we will drive strong returns for Amazon over the long term,” he wrote on X.
Amazon and OpenAI plan to invest $50 billion
The partnership between OpenAI and Amazon is not just about handing over capital.
One of the central investments is in infrastructure. As part of this billion-dollar partnership, OpenAI and Amazon Web Services (AWS) will significantly expand their existing multi-year arrangement, increasing infrastructure commitments by $100 billion over eight years. Under this expanded agreement, OpenAI has committed to consume approximately 2 gigawatts of AWS Tranium compute capacity to support training and inference workloads for advanced AI systems.
According to OpenAI, this long-term commitment will help reduce the costs and improve the efficiency of producing AI at scale. It will include both the current Trenium 3 chips and the next-generation Trenium 4 silicon, which are expected to begin delivery in 2027 and will provide substantial performance benefits, including higher compute capacity and greater memory bandwidth.
Another main focus of the partnership is the joint development of a stateful runtime environment powered by OpenAI models. The new system will be available to AWS customers through Amazon Bedrock and is designed to support context-aware AI agents that can remember prior interactions, access tools and data sources, and work in complex workflows.
Additionally, OpenAI has announced that AWS will become the exclusive third-party cloud delivery provider for OpenAI Frontier, the company’s enterprise AI platform, which enables organizations to create, deploy, and manage teams of AI agents with built-in governance and enterprise-grade security.
Meanwhile, the partnership also includes product-level integration. OpenAI and Amazon will collaborate on developing customized AI models for Amazon’s customer-facing applications. These models will be made available to Amazon developers and are expected to complement the company’s existing Nova family of models, offering additional flexibility for building AI-powered services and agents.