On Monday, tech giants OpenAI and Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced a multi-year partnership, marking the artificial intelligence company’s next step towards massive scaling and a step away from its long-time parter Microsoft.
Effective immediately, OpenAI now has access to Amazon’s infrastructure as part of a seven year $38 billion deal. The agreement provides the AI company with access to hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA graphic processing units as it begins running its workload on AWS’s infrastructure.
“As OpenAI continues to push the boundaries of what’s possible, AWS’s best-in-class infrastructure will serve as a backbone for their AI ambitions,” said Matt Garman, CEO of AWS said in a press release.
At the time of publishing, Amazon’s stock had jumped 5 percent following news of the announcement.
In addition to paving the path towards rapid expansion and growth of its ChatGPT large language model and other AI initiatives, the deal also marks the AI company moving on from Microsoft, its longtime cloud services provider. However, they’re still presenting a united front.
“As we step into this next chapter of our partnership, both companies are better positioned than ever to continue building great products that meet real-world needs, and create new opportunity for everyone and every business,” the companies said in a joint press release on October 28.
The companies are weathering a complicated relationship, with Microsoft investing up to $13 billion in OpenAI since an initial $1 billion in 2019 that came with an exclusivity agreement to use Microsoft cloud services. Last week, both tech companies renegotiated an agreement which allowed OpenAI to buy cloud services from any provider.
“Scaling frontier AI requires massive, reliable compute,” said OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman in a press release. “Our partnership with AWS strengthens the broad compute ecosystem that will power this next era and bring advanced AI to everyone.”
The multibillion dollar deal follows a series of OpenAI investments to boost the company’s scalability and computing power, including a data center deal with Oracle, a cloud deal with Google, and a data center projects in the United Arab Emirates.
María José Gutierrez Chavez
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