OpenAI and Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) announced a broad strategic partnership aimed at accelerating artificial intelligence development and adoption across enterprises, startups, and consumer applications worldwide. As part of the agreement, Amazon plans to invest $50 billion in OpenAI, beginning with an initial $15 billion commitment, followed by an additional $35 billion contingent on certain milestones being met.
Joint development of next-generation AI runtime environment
A central component of the collaboration involves the joint creation of a Stateful Runtime Environment powered by OpenAI’s models, which will be delivered through Amazon Bedrock.
The new environment is designed to represent the next stage in how advanced AI systems are deployed, allowing models to maintain context over time and interact more deeply with computing resources, memory, identity systems, and external tools. Developers will be able to run long-duration workflows in which AI systems retain knowledge of prior tasks, operate across multiple software platforms, and access scalable compute resources.
According to the companies, these stateful developer environments will be optimized for Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure and integrated with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and other AWS services, enabling AI applications and agents to operate seamlessly alongside existing enterprise systems. The Stateful Runtime Environment is expected to launch within the next few months.
OpenAI Frontier to be distributed through AWS
Under the agreement, AWS will become the exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider for OpenAI Frontier, the company’s enterprise AI platform designed to help organizations deploy and manage teams of AI agents across business operations.
Frontier enables companies to build and operate AI systems with shared context, governance controls, and enterprise-grade security without directly managing infrastructure. The platform is intended to help businesses transition from experimental AI projects to large-scale production deployments integrated into existing workflows.
The companies said expanding Frontier availability through AWS reflects growing demand from organizations seeking scalable and secure AI deployment solutions.
Expanded compute agreement centered on Trainium chips
OpenAI and AWS also announced a major expansion of their existing infrastructure partnership, increasing the value of their multi-year agreement by $100 billion over eight years.
As part of the expansion, OpenAI will commit to consuming roughly two gigawatts of AWS Trainium computing capacity to support workloads tied to Stateful Runtime, Frontier, and other advanced AI applications. The companies said the arrangement is designed to reduce costs and improve efficiency in large-scale AI training and deployment.
The agreement provides OpenAI with long-term compute capacity while enabling AWS to deploy purpose-built AI silicon alongside its broader cloud infrastructure, allowing enterprises to access AI capabilities on demand without managing underlying systems.
The commitment covers both current Trainium3 processors and future Trainium4 chips, which are expected to begin shipping in 2027. Trainium4 is projected to deliver significant performance improvements, including higher FP4 compute performance, increased memory bandwidth, and expanded high-bandwidth memory capacity to support increasingly complex AI models.
Customized AI models for Amazon applications
The partnership also includes joint development of customized OpenAI models tailored for Amazon’s customer-facing products. Amazon developers will be able to adapt these models for use in applications and AI agents that interact directly with users, complementing existing tools such as Amazon’s Nova model family.
“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.”
“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.”