OpenAI pushes AWS access

OpenAI is telling employees that its Amazon Web Services alliance is opening doors that its Microsoft deal left shut. (cnbc.com) In a staff memo sent Sunday, April 12, chief revenue officer Denise Dresser wrote that Microsoft had been “foundational” but had also “limited our ability to meet enterprises where they are — for many that’s Bedrock,” Amazon Web Services’ marketplace for artificial intelligence models. (cnbc.com) Dresser said customer demand since the Amazon announcement in late February has been “frankly staggering.” CNBC reported that Amazon plans to invest up to $50 billion in OpenAI as part of the partnership. (cnbc.com) The shift tracks where OpenAI says its business is growing. The company said enterprise now makes up more than 40% of revenue and is on track to reach parity with consumer revenue by the end of 2026. (openai.com) OpenAI also said it is now generating $2 billion in monthly revenue, while its application programming interfaces process more than 15 billion tokens per minute and Codex has reached 3 million weekly active users. Those are the kinds of usage numbers that make cloud distribution a sales issue, not just an infrastructure issue. (openai.com, openai.com) For years, Microsoft was OpenAI’s main route into corporate computing, after investing more than $13 billion starting in 2019 and serving as its exclusive cloud infrastructure partner. Selling through Amazon Web Services gives OpenAI access to companies that already buy software and computing there instead of on Microsoft Azure. (cnbc.com) That matters in the current artificial intelligence market because Amazon Web Services Bedrock and Microsoft Azure are competing to become the control panel companies use to buy models, manage security, and connect artificial intelligence tools to internal data. OpenAI is now trying to be available in both places instead of forcing customers onto one cloud. (cnbc.com) The memo also landed days after OpenAI used a separate investor note to argue that rival Anthropic is on a “meaningfully smaller curve,” showing that OpenAI is fighting on two fronts at once: against a close model competitor and around the terms of its biggest platform partnership. (cnbc.com, cnbc.com) Microsoft has not publicly broken with OpenAI, and Dresser’s memo still described the relationship as central to the company’s rise. But OpenAI is now making a direct pitch to customers who want its models inside Amazon’s cloud, not just Microsoft’s. (cnbc.com)