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Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and OpenAI announced a multi-year, strategic partnership that provides AWS’s world-class infrastructure to run and scale OpenAI’s core artificial intelligence (AI) workloads starting immediately.
Under this new $38 billion agreement, which will have continued growth over the next seven years, OpenAI is accessing AWS compute comprising hundreds of thousands of state-of-the-art NVIDIA GPUs, with the ability to expand to tens of millions of CPUs to rapidly scale agentic workloads.
OpenAI will immediately start utilizing AWS compute as part of this partnership, with all capacity targeted to be deployed before the end of 2026, and the ability to expand further into 2027 and beyond.
Clustering the NVIDIA GPUs—both GB200s and GB300s—via Amazon EC2 UltraServers on the same network enables low-latency performance across interconnected systems, allowing OpenAI to efficiently run workloads with optimal performance. The clusters are designed to support various workloads, from serving inference for ChatGPT to training next generation models, with the flexibility to adapt to OpenAI's evolving needs.
“The breadth and immediate availability of optimized compute demonstrates why AWS is uniquely positioned to support OpenAI's vast AI workloads.”
On Monday, Amazon’s cloud unit suffered one of the worst outages in its history, taking down its most important cluster of data centers and disrupting the operations of hundreds of companies and consumer apps. Trading platforms, digital curriculums for students, online utility payments for Seattle, Amazon’s hometown, were all disrupted. The event dragged on for 15 hours before AWS managed to get all of its services back online.
Financial results due next week are expected to show a cloud business that grew 18% to $32 billion, slowing modestly from the 19% growth AWS posted a year earlier.
Anthropic, in the search for ever more computing power, subsequently started using Google’s cloud, in addition to Amazon servers. When the startup raised money from investors in early 2023, Google was among them.
Amazon’s retail organization and the Alexa and devices group were all pursuing similar, sometimes duplicative work training their own AI models, current and former employees said.
Amid an industrywide talent war for AI expertise, several senior AWS people left, including executives leading components of the AI push, startup sales, chip design and data center infrastructure.
Some teams began requiring workers to seek permission before emailing senior executives, a layer of process and formal hierarchy that belied Amazon’s startup ethos.
But in recent years, Amazon has at times prioritized big-spending corporations and wrestled with how much energy to devote to small companies that might never become long-term paying customers, employees said.
Google, according to analysts and startup advisors, has parlayed its name recognition with a generation of engineers and its chops in cutting-edge AI tools into relationships with many leading AI startups.
“If you are not winning the native AI startup companies today that are going to be five, 10 times as large in next couple years, then that can be a real issue for the business,” said Josh Beck, an analyst with Raymond James. Shen said AWS was “the top choice for startups.”
He opted to go with Google for its focus on smaller developers and the quality of its in-house AI models. AWS “used to do a much better job of attracting folks like us,” Schwab said. “That’s obviously an important currency for us, how well they support the little guys. And Google’s just doing a better job of that.”
In Indiana, Amazon is racing to finish an $11 billion data center complex built primarily for Anthropic, anchoring a cluster of hundreds of thousands of Trainium chips that AWS is stitching together for the startup. If Anthropic can build cutting-edge models on the hardware, it would validate Amazon’s approach and could attract more customers looking to replicate its success.
Amazon is now in a dogfight with rivals it once easily lapped.
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AWS customer AI safety and research company Anthropic will use this brand-new “AI compute cluster” to build and deploy future versions of its leading AI model, Claude.
The more interesting bit is Trainium2, a custom-designed AWS computer chip built specifically for training AI systems.
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