Amazon is in talks for a multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI and AI chip shipments

Amazon is discussing with OpenAI an investment of more than $10 billion, as well as the sale of chips and computing power to the startup, several leading Western business publications reported on December 17. The deal could be a breakthrough for Amazon in promoting its own AI processors to compete with solutions from Nvidia and Google.

The agreement under discussion with Amazon envisages the startup's use of Trainium AI chips produced by the tech giant, as well as expanding the lease of data center capacity for ChatGPT, the Financial Times quoted sources as saying. According to The Information, which was the first to report on the pending deal, talks began in the fall of 2025 and are at an early stage. If it goes through, OpenAI's valuation could exceed $500 billion, the FT points out.

The agreement comes amid a loosening of OpenAI's ties to its earlier investor, Microsoft. In late October, the companies renegotiated the terms of their partnership, allowing OpenAI to rent computing power from Microsoft's rival cloud providers. And a few days later, the startup struck a deal with Amazon, committing to spend $38 billion to lease servers over seven years. The investment and cloud agreement now under discussion will be in addition to that contract, the FT notes.

The deal with OpenAI will be a major success for Amazon's burgeoning chip division, which competes with developments from Nvidia and Google. Amazon's processors are already used to train one of ChatGPT's main competitors in the enterprise segment, Anthropic's Claude chatbot, the FT recalls. Anthropic itself has raised a total of about $26 billion from Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Nvidia, and uses their hardware and services.

Amazon's quotes on the OTC Blue Ocean ATS trading on December 17 jumped 1%, reversing after a drawdown on the Nasdaq post-market. In November 2025, Amazon returned to the main outsiders of the "Magnificent Seven" - amid growing investor doubts about the justification of huge investments in AI, the shares of the cloud giant lost the 16-percent gain accumulated since January.

At the same time, the consensus "buy" rating on Amazon shares has only strengthened over the past month: the number of recommendations to buy (Buy and Overweight ratings) increased on Wall Street from 68 to 70, and the number of neutral ratings (Hold) decreased from four to three. No analysts advise selling Amazon securities. Their average target price of $297.5 suggests a potential upside to current quotes by a third.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor