OpenAI leans into AWS

OpenAI is telling employees that Amazon, not just Microsoft, is now central to its push for corporate customers. (cnbc.com) In a Sunday memo viewed by CNBC, chief revenue officer Denise Dresser wrote that Microsoft had been “foundational” but had also limited OpenAI’s ability to reach companies that buy artificial intelligence tools through Amazon Web Services’ Bedrock platform. (cnbc.com) Dresser said customer interest since OpenAI and Amazon announced their partnership on February 27, 2026, has been “frankly staggering.” OpenAI told CNBC earlier in April that enterprise customers now generate 40% of revenue and could match its consumer business by the end of 2026. (cnbc.com) Bedrock is Amazon’s marketplace for large language models, the systems that generate text, code, and images from prompts. OpenAI and Amazon said on February 27 that OpenAI models will be built into Bedrock and that Amazon Web Services will become the exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider for OpenAI Frontier, its enterprise agent platform. (openai.com) That February deal also made Amazon an investor as well as a reseller. OpenAI said Amazon will invest $50 billion, starting with $15 billion up front and another $35 billion if conditions are met. (openai.com) The shift comes after OpenAI rewrote its relationship with Microsoft in October 2025, when Microsoft said OpenAI would remain its frontier-model partner and Azure would keep exclusive application programming interface rights until artificial general intelligence is declared. Microsoft also said OpenAI could jointly develop some non-application-programming-interface products with third parties and run those on any cloud. (blogs.microsoft.com) Microsoft is still deeply tied to OpenAI. Microsoft said in October 2025 that its stake in OpenAI Group Public Benefit Corporation was worth about $135 billion, or roughly 27% on an as-converted diluted basis, after investing more than $13 billion since 2019. (blogs.microsoft.com; cnbc.com) OpenAI’s memo lands in a fight over business customers, not just chatbot popularity. CNBC reported that Anthropic’s Claude has become a leading model in the enterprise market, while Google’s Gemini is also competing aggressively for the same accounts. (cnbc.com) For now, OpenAI is not breaking with Microsoft so much as widening the pipes through which companies can buy its tools. The company is training customers and employees to treat Amazon Web Services as one of those pipes. (cnbc.com; openai.com)