According toThe Information website reportedSources familiar with the matter revealed that OpenAI is in talks with Amazon to raise up to $100 billion (or more) in additional funding. A crucial condition of the deal is that OpenAI will commit to using Amazon's AI chips.
They just signed a cloud computing agreement, and now they're talking about equity investment?
Back in early November, OpenAI announced a seven-year, $38 billion (approximately NT$1.2 trillion) deal with Amazon.Cloud service procurement contract.
The original announcement indicated that AWS would provide OpenAI with a cluster of super servers based on Amazon EC2, with deployment expected to be completed by the end of 2026. This latest news of further investment negotiations suggests that the partnership may be evolving from a simple "customer relationship" to a "strategic partnership."
Aiming at AWS's self-developed chips to break free from NVIDIA's dominance
The "use of Amazon AI chips" mentioned in the report is the highlight of the whole incident. Currently, AI model training relies heavily on NVIDIA GPUs, but the high price and tight production capacity have always been pain points for OpenAI.
In recent years, Amazon has been actively developing its own Trainium and Inferentia series chips, attempting to challenge NVIDIA's dominant position. If OpenAI agrees to use AWS chips to train or run its GPT series models, it will not only reduce OpenAI's computing costs, but for Amazon, it will also be the best advertisement for the performance of its own chips.
Analysis and perspective: Decentralized computing power – what is Microsoft's view?
In my opinion, OpenAI's move once again proves that "computing power is power." With Microsoft already investing $130 billion, OpenAI is still turning to Amazon for tens of billions of dollars in funding, showing that its cash burn rate is far beyond imagination. Sam Altman clearly does not want the company's lifeline to be completely controlled by a single cloud service provider or a single hardware supplier.
This is a typical "hedging strategy." By bringing in Amazon as a wealthy backer, OpenAI can gain bargaining power between Microsoft and Amazon. For Amazon, having missed the first wave of generative AI, investing in and securing OpenAI to use its own chips would be an excellent opportunity to overtake Microsoft Azure in the AI cloud arena.
However, whether Microsoft will invoke contractual clauses to block the deal will be a key point of observation going forward.
