Sam Altman’s blowtorch to his competitors is so hot, it even includes a new partnership with Amazon Web Services.
As OpenAI announced two open-weight reasoning models with capabilities on par with its o-series, Amazon announced that the new models would become available on Tuesday as a service on AWS. For the first time, OpenAI models will be available as a model choice with Amazon AI services like Bedrock and SageMaker AI.
While anyone can download the models via Hugging Face, Amazon didn’t just grab the models to offer them as an AWS service on their own. This is a partnership with OpenAI, as Dmitry Pimenov, the model maker’s product lead, indicated in the announcement.
This is a juicy competitive move for both companies. For AWS, it finally puts the cloud giant in the same sentence as the biggest model maker, OpenAI.
Until now, AWS has best been known as a major host and a financial backer of Anthropic’s Claude, one of OpenAI’s biggest competitors. AWS offers Claude, along with other models from makers such as Cohere, DeepSeek, Meta, and Mistral, as well as its own home-grown ones in its AI services. Specifically, Bedrock allows AWS customers to build and host generative AI apps using models of their choice. SageMaker, on the other hand, allows AWS customers to train, or even build, their own AI models largely for analytics uses.
While AWS’s ultimate rival, Microsoft, hasn’t had a lock on OpenAI models since January, Azure is still OpenAI’s most significant cloud partner to date. OpenAI even announced that Microsoft is offering versions of these two new models, too, optimized for Windows devices.
Watching Microsoft win an increasing amount of cloud business with OpenAI has been a public pain in Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s neck. Just last week during Amazon’s quarterly earnings call, Jassy was pounded with questions from Wall Street analysts about how the company was losing ground in AI to competitors, particularly Microsoft.
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For instance, JPMorgan analyst Doug Anmuth asked Jassy to explain “significantly faster cloud growth among the number two and number three players in the space,” referring to Microsoft and Google. Later, Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak told Jassy that Wall Street thinks “AWS is falling behind in GenAI with concerns about share loss, peers, etc.”
Jassy responded with a minutes-long diatribe that included this barb at Redmond: “I think the second player is about 65% of the size of the AWS.”
Meanwhile, another AWS competitor, Oracle, reported that it signed a $30 billion a year deal with OpenAI to offer data center services. This means that OpenAI plans to pay Oracle more each year than all of its other cloud services customers combined. Until now, AWS had been left out of any OpenAI-related glory.
As for how such a move with AWS benefits OpenAI: The AI provider’s relationship with Microsoft is notoriously strained, as the two are reportedly renegotiating their long-term partnership deal. What better way for OpenAI to strengthen its position than to cozy up the biggest cloud provider, even if, initially, on a small scale?
In addition, this partnership allows swaths of AWS enterprise customers to easily experiment with using OpenAI models with their hosted AI apps.
All while Altman gets to undercut Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg with this move as well. As OpenAI releases these two high-performing models under an Apache 2.0 open source license, Meta recently admitted that it probably won’t continue to open source all of its upcoming “superintelligence” models.
AWS did not immediately respond to our request for additional comment.
