OpenAI leans on Amazon

OpenAI is telling employees that Amazon, not Microsoft, is now central to winning more corporate customers. (cnbc.com) In an internal memo reviewed by CNBC, chief revenue officer Denise Dresser said Microsoft had “limited our ability” to reach customers directly and said the Amazon partnership is a key driver of enterprise growth. Dresser joined OpenAI this year after serving as a longtime enterprise sales executive at Slack and Splunk. (cnbc.com) The shift follows OpenAI’s February 27, 2026 agreement with Amazon: a multi-year partnership, up to $50 billion of Amazon investment, and a plan to distribute OpenAI Frontier through Amazon Web Services as the exclusive third-party cloud provider. OpenAI also said it would use 2 gigawatts of Amazon Trainium chip capacity and build a “Stateful Runtime Environment” for customers on Amazon Bedrock. (openai.com) That arrangement gives OpenAI a new route into large companies because Amazon Web Services already sells cloud software and computing to enterprises around the world. OpenAI said Frontier lets companies build and manage teams of artificial intelligence agents, while Amazon said Bedrock will host the new runtime for production-scale applications. (openai.com) (aboutamazon.com) The memo adds to a broader pattern: OpenAI has spent months warning investors that its dependence on Microsoft is a business risk. In financing materials reported by CNBC on March 23, OpenAI said Microsoft supplies “a substantial portion” of its funding and computing power. (cnbc.com) OpenAI had already begun moving workloads to Amazon before the February investment announcement. On November 3, 2025, CNBC reported that OpenAI signed a $38 billion Amazon Web Services capacity deal, its first major cloud infrastructure contract with the market leader outside Microsoft. (cnbc.com) Amazon has presented the partnership as a way to pull OpenAI’s models and tools deeper into its own cloud business and consumer products. In the February announcement, the companies said they would also develop customized models for Amazon’s customer-facing applications. (aboutamazon.com) Microsoft still remains a major OpenAI partner even as OpenAI broadens its alliances. CNBC reported in February that Sam Altman and Andy Jassy described the Amazon deal as a long-term partnership, while the April memo shows OpenAI now wants Amazon’s sales channel to help it reach enterprises more directly. (cnbc.com 1) (cnbc.com 2)