Amazon clearly doesn’t want to watch the AI wave from the shore. According to several sources, the American group is in discussions with OpenAI for a massive investment which could exceed $10 billion. An operation still far from being finalized, but which would immediately place OpenAI at a valuation of more than $500 billion – a level already reached during a recent sale of shares reserved for employees and former employees.
Amazon gets closer to ChatGPT
Negotiations are described as “ very fluid ”, which, in the quiet language of Silicon Valley, means that everything can still evolve. But the very idea of this merger says a lot about the state of the market: generative AI consumes enormous resources, and those who control the cloud and the specialized chips want to be at the forefront. Amazon and OpenAI are not starting from scratch. Last November, OpenAI signed a $38 billion deal to Buy cloud capacity from Amazon Web Services. A turning point for the company, long associated almost exclusively with Microsoft Azure. Since then, OpenAI has clearly diversified its suppliers and alliances.
At the same time, Nvidia, Oracle and Broadcom have concluded multi-billion dollar agreements with OpenAI. Training and operating increasingly demanding models requires extraordinary infrastructures. According to the site The InformationOpenAI would consider using Trainium chips designed by Amazon, direct competitors to those of Nvidia and Google.
AWS has been working on its own accelerators for almost ten years. Inferentia launched in 2018, and a new generation of Trainium was recently revealed. Running ChatGPT and its cousins on these in-house chips would be a great showcase for Amazon, as well as a way to reduce its dependence on Nvidia. Another avenue mentioned: the sale of a “business” version of ChatGPT to Amazon. On the other hand, the integration of functions linked to shopping, an area in which Amazon is already moving cautiously, remains unclear.
This possible investment comes at a key time for OpenAI. In October, the company completed a restructuring that gives it more room to raise funds and form partnerships. The group remains controlled by a nonprofit entity, but with far fewer constraints than before. Microsoft remains a central player in the matter. The group retains an exclusive right to sell OpenAI models to its cloud customers, but no longer has top priority to provide computing power. In other words, OpenAI can now look elsewhere, like Amazon, for example.
In the background, another deadline looms: an IPO which could, according to some estimates, push the valuation of OpenAI up to… 1,000 billion dollars.
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