Amazon is in early talks to invest up to $10 billion in OpenAI in a deal that would see the AI lab use the e-commerce giant’s AI chips. CNBC was mentioned.
If it goes through, the deal would value OpenAI at more than $500 billion, according to Bloomberg was mentionedciting an anonymous source. The Information he was the first to make reference to the story.
Amazon has sought to diversify its bets in the AI race, which has so far seen it partner with and invest $8 billion in Anthropic, an OpenAI rival. The e-commerce giant earlier this month also unveiled its latest iteration Trainium series of chipsand described the development of the next installment of these chips, complementing cloud computing offerings through Amazon Web Services.
News of the deal comes a few months after OpenAI completed its transition to a for-profit model, which gives it more freedom to strike deals with investors other than Microsoft, one of the company’s early backers with a 27 percent stake.
Amazon’s investment in OpenAI would mark the latest in a series of circular deals in the AI space — big hardware makers and cloud providers strike deals with young AI companies to use their products, while young ones pledge to use their data centers and chips to train their AI models.
Last March, OpenAI invested $350 million in shares in CoreWeave, which used the funds to buy chips from backer Nvidia. These same chips provide computation to OpenAI, which increases CoreWeave’s revenue and ultimately makes OpenAI’s stake more valuable. Then in October, OpenAI signed a deal to acquire a 10% stake in AMD and commit to using the chipmaker’s AI GPUs, while also signing a chip usage agreement with Broadcom that month. And in November, the ChatGPT maker signed on a $38 billion cloud computing deal with Amazon;.
OpenAI and Amazon did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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