AWS Joins OpenAI Club

An AWS data center in Ashburn, Va. Getty Images.

If you’re tired of the seemingly endless parade of AI cloud deals, better get comfortable with them: They’re not going away anytime soon. On Monday, for instance, Microsoft struck deals with two little-known cloud firms, Lambda and Australia’s Iren, for additional computing capacity. Another firm, Cipher Mining Inc. announced a similar deal to provide capacity to Amazon’s cloud unit Amazon Web Services. More significantly, AWS announced a deal to run OpenAI’s “core artificial intelligence workloads starting immediately.” OpenAI now has arrangements with all three of the big cloud firms—including Microsoft and Google—as well as Oracle and newer cloud firm CoreWeave. And the company is planning to build its own data centers! Yes, OpenAI is the wave that lifts all boats in cloud.

The AWS-OpenAI deal is worth at least $38 billion over several years, with the potential to grow. That’s not a lot: Microsoft, OpenAI’s original partner, last week said it had won a $250 billion incremental commitment to whatever OpenAI was already committed to spending. OpenAI has agreed to spend around $300 billion on Oracle over the next few years. But having a smaller exposure to the ChatGPT creator, at least for now, might prove a blessing in disguise for AWS.