OpenAI has signed a new £38 billion deal with Amazon, which will see the tech giant supply the ChatGPT maker with cloud computing services and hundreds of thousands of graphic chip units from Nvidia.

The deal is one of the first OpenAI has made since reconfiguring itself to be partially for profit. While it maintains its relationship with Microsoft, the new business model enables it to make other enterprising deals, and unsurprisingly, everyone wants a piece.

And OpenAI needs the compute power. It will still use Microsoft Azure for some of its cloud computing needs, and also has a deal with Google Cloud. Further, the firm reportedly bough $300bn worth of computing power from Oracle for five years.

The deal with AWS signals a positive trends for the importance of compute power in the age of AI, with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman saying the company will spend $1.4 trillion towards the development of 30 gigawatts of computing power.

The new partnership will see OpenAI use AWS’s cloud computing services with immediate affect. All of the planned capacity is set to come online by the end of this year, with room for expansion in 2027.

The chips AWS will deploy will be used to support training OpenAI’s future models as well as powering ChatGPT. OpenAI may also use AWS’s data centres for its agentic AI endeavours.

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The deal sent Amazon’s shares up by 5% in premarket trading, and signified a boost of confidence for its cloud computing organisation.

“Scaling frontier AI requires massive, reliable compute,” said OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman. “Our partnership with AWS strengthens the broad compute ecosystem that will power this next era and bring advanced AI to everyone.”

CEO of AWS, Matt Garman, said: “As OpenAI continues to push the boundaries of what’s possible, AWS’s best-in-class infrastructure will serve as a backbone for their AI ambitions. The breadth and immediate availability of optimized compute demonstrates why AWS is uniquely positioned to support OpenAI’s vast AI workloads.”