OpenAI partnered with Amazon to build infrastructure for agents on the world’s largest cloud platform, a further sign that its close relationship with Microsoft is weakening.
What’s new: OpenAI and Amazon announced a “stateful runtime environment,” a forthcoming computing infrastructure designed for AI agents. The companies did not disclose the projected launch date. The partnership diversifies OpenAI’s cloud-computing resources beyond Microsoft Azure and lets Amazon use OpenAI models in its own products. As part of the deal, Amazon invested $15 billion in OpenAI with an additional $35 billion to come if certain undisclosed conditions are met, or if OpenAI offers it stock to the public prior to 2029, according to an analysis of related documents by GeekWire. Moreover, if the cloud partnership terminates, Amazon’s remaining $35 billion commitment will die with it. The investment was a part of a gargantuan $110 billion funding round that included Nvidia and Softbank and valued OpenAI at $730 billion. (Disclosure: Andrew Ng is a member of Amazon’s Board of Directors.)
- OpenAI and Amazon Web Services (AWS) will develop a stateful runtime environment that will run on Amazon Bedrock, Amazon’s platform for building and deploying AI applications. Expected to launch within months, the environment is designed to manage agents’ working states including memories, tool connections, and user permissions.
- AWS is the exclusive third-party cloud provider of OpenAI Frontier, a platform for building, deploying, and managing AI agents across a company. Customers who buy Frontier through Amazon will be served via Amazon Bedrock, while those that buy directly from OpenAI will be served via Microsoft Azure.
- OpenAI and Amazon will develop custom models for Amazon’s products.
- OpenAI committed to use Amazon Trainium chips, which are designed by Amazon for AI workloads). OpenAI promised to consume 2 gigawatts’ worth of Tranium processing, expanding its previous $38 billion agreement with AWS by $100 billion over 8 years.
How it works: Many developers interact with AI models through stateless APIs for which each request is independent. A developer sends a prompt, receives a response, and the model retains no memory of the exchange, so developers must pass all context into every request. The stateful runtime environment aims to handle that context, helping agents to execute long, multi-step workflows without losing track of where they are. In addition, customers will have access to customized versions of open-weights OpenAI models that run on AWS, The Information reported.
- OpenAI argues that stateless APIs are insufficient for AI agents in production, which depend on outputs from multiple tools, require human approvals, and must resume if they’re interrupted.
- The distinction between stateful and stateless — a typical attribute of APIs — also serves a legal purpose. The agreement between OpenAI and Microsoft makes Azure the exclusive host for OpenAI’s stateless APIs, but a runtime environment falls outside the scope of Microsoft’s right. Azure will host stateless API calls to OpenAI models that arise from the Amazon collaboration
- The environment will be integrated with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, Amazon’s tools for deploying and managing AI agents, and will run in customers’ existing environments with AWS.
Behind the news: The partnership between OpenAI and Amazon marks the latest step in the dissolution of the tight cloud partnerships that defined the early generative AI era. In 2019, Microsoft invested $1 billion (which subsequently rose beyond $13 billion) in OpenAI and became its exclusive cloud provider. In 2023, Amazon invested up to $4 billion in Anthropic and became its primary cloud provider. Each deal paired an AI startup with a cloud giant. Both ties have since loosened.
- By late 2024, both Microsoft and OpenAI were working to reduce their interdependence, as OpenAI’s needs outstripped the computational resources Microsoft was willing to build, and Microsoft put more attention into developing its own AI capabilities.
- In October 2025, when OpenAI restructured itself as a for-profit public benefit corporation, the terms gave Microsoft a 27 percent stake and 20 percent of OpenAI’s revenue but removed its right of first refusal on cloud business, freeing OpenAI to work with other providers.
- On the day the Amazon deal was announced, Microsoft and OpenAI issued a joint statement that their partnership was ongoing. Microsoft retains its exclusive access to OpenAI’s intellectual property, such as model weights, and will continue to share in revenue from OpenAI’s partnerships with other cloud providers.
- A mirror image has played out on Amazon’s side. Anthropic, Amazon’s primary AI partner, had been on Google Cloud since before Amazon invested in it, and later it expanded to Microsoft. In November 2025, Microsoft invested up to $5 billion in Anthropic and made Claude models available on Azure, making Claude the first leading model family available on all three major cloud platforms.
- According to documents filed with the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission and reviewed by GeekWire, Amazon’s equity investment and cloud partnership are contractually linked. If the agreement terminates, Amazon’s remaining $35 billion commitment will die with it.
Why it matters: Developers who build AI agents typically build their own state management, tool orchestration, and fault recovery on top of stateless APIs. A runtime environment that’s designed to handle these functions as infrastructure could lower the barrier to deploying AI agents. On the flip side, depending on exactly what state is stored and how portable it is, it may increase the cost to switch to a different cloud vendor. That it will run on AWS, the largest cloud provider by market share, will make it available to a wide swath of the developer community.
We’re thinking: Distinguishing between stateless and stateful may be clever legal engineering, but it also reflects a real technical shift. As AI applications move toward autonomy, the infrastructure behind agents may matter as much as the models.