OpenAI pushes beyond Microsoft

OpenAI is telling employees and customers that Amazon is now a major route to sell its artificial intelligence tools, not just Microsoft. (cnbc.com) In a memo reported by CNBC on April 13, chief revenue officer Denise Dresser said Microsoft had been “foundational” but had also limited OpenAI’s ability to meet enterprise customers on Amazon Web Services’ Bedrock platform. Microsoft said its revenue-sharing terms with OpenAI “remain unchanged.” (cnbc.com) (openai.com) Amazon and OpenAI announced a strategic partnership on February 27, 2026. Amazon said it would invest $50 billion in OpenAI, and the companies said OpenAI models would be offered through Bedrock while OpenAI would use Amazon infrastructure, including 2 gigawatts of Trainium capacity. (aboutamazon.com) (openai.com) Bedrock is Amazon’s marketplace for large language models, which are the systems that generate text, code, and images from prompts. Selling there gives OpenAI access to companies that already buy cloud services from Amazon and want to add models without changing vendors. (aboutamazon.com) Microsoft and OpenAI said in a joint statement on February 27 that Azure remains the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI’s stateless application programming interfaces, the standard model calls that return an answer without storing ongoing session state. The same statement said OpenAI can still do deals with other cloud providers under the existing revenue-share arrangement. (openai.com) (blogs.microsoft.com) That leaves OpenAI trying to widen distribution without fully unwinding its Microsoft ties. Amazon said its Bedrock offering with OpenAI will include a “Stateful Runtime Environment,” a setup aimed at longer-running agents that keep track of context across tasks. (aboutamazon.com) (openai.com) The relationship with Microsoft is still large. Microsoft has invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI since 2019, and a 2025 restructuring gave Microsoft a 27% stake in OpenAI’s public benefit corporation and included a $250 billion Azure usage commitment from OpenAI, according to GeekWire. (geekwire.com) Amazon is also spending heavily to become a bigger artificial intelligence infrastructure provider. GeekWire reported in March that Amazon tied the OpenAI deal to a broader plan for $200 billion in capital expenditures in 2026, even as Amazon maintains a separate high-profile partnership with Anthropic. (geekwire.com) For now, OpenAI’s message is not that Microsoft is out and Amazon is in. It is that OpenAI wants its models sold in more than one cloud storefront while the Microsoft contract still governs a core part of how those models reach customers. (cnbc.com) (openai.com)