OpenAI has signed a multiyear, $38 billion infrastructure deal with Amazon Web Services.
The agreement gives the ChatGPT maker vast new computing power to train and deploy its next generation of AI models. Furthermore, the deal is one of the largest cloud contracts ever announced. It cements Amazon’s position at the center of the artificial intelligence race. At the same time, it reshapes how AI innovation will ripple across global commerce.
Under the agreement, OpenAI will immediately begin running its workloads on AWS infrastructure. Amazon said the partnership includes access to “hundreds of thousands” of Nvidia GPUs housed in EC2 UltraServers, with the ability to scale up to “tens of millions of CPUs” by the end of 2026. The clusters will interconnect Nvidia’s latest GB200 and GB300 chips to handle both training and inference on a massive scale.
“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.”
Amazon ranks No. 1 in Digital Commerce 360’s Top 2000 Database. The database is how Digital Commerce 360 tracks the largest North American online retailers by their annual ecommerce sales.
Amazon is also No. 3 in Digital Commerce 360’s Global Online Marketplaces Database. That database ranks the 100 largest such marketplaces by third-party gross merchandise value (GMV).
About OpenAI’s deal with Amazon’s AWS
AWS chief executive Matt Garman called the company’s infrastructure “a backbone for [OpenAI’s] AI ambitions.” He said the breadth and immediacy of optimized compute show why AWS is “uniquely positioned to support OpenAI’s vast AI workloads.”
The seven-year partnership expands the existing relationship between the companies. Earlier this year, OpenAI added its open-weight foundation models to Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s managed service for generative AI. Bedrock is where customers such as Comscore, Peloton, Thomson Reuters and Triomics are already using the technology for agentic workflows, coding and analytics.
Beyond the infrastructure headlines, the OpenAI-AWS deal signals a fundamental shift for online retail and digital commerce. It establishes the compute backbone for a new generation of intelligent, adaptive shopping systems. It also accelerates what analysts call “agentic commerce,” where AI agents autonomously assist, recommend and transact on behalf of shoppers and businesses.
The scale of computing OpenAI now commands will allow for faster, more capable generative models that can power conversational shopping assistants across Amazon and third-party retail platforms. Consumers could soon search, compare and purchase through dialogue instead of static filters. They’ll be able to ask AI in natural-language to “find me the best power drill under $200 with same-day delivery” and receiving tailored, real-time recommendations.
Implications of the OpenAI-AWS deal
With AWS infrastructure behind it, OpenAI can serve billions of personalized recommendations simultaneously, using deeper contextual data — browsing patterns, location and intent — to refine offers in milliseconds. For marketplaces, that means higher conversion and reduced friction. And for consumers, it means a shopping experience that feels more like consulting an expert than scrolling a catalog.
The partnership also has implications for business-to-business (B2B) commerce. AI models running at this scale can automate complex procurement, inventory and pricing decisions, forecasting demand across distributor networks, or dynamically adjusting bulk-order pricing. B2B marketplaces — from industrial supply to building materials — stand to gain as predictive agents handle quoting, reordering and contract compliance autonomously.
Agent-to-agent communication — where one company’s purchasing agent interacts directly with another is selling agent — will depend on precisely the kind of computer architecture OpenAI and AWS are building. The massive capacity ensures low-latency interaction between billions of concurrent agents, a foundational requirement for the next decade of digital trade.
The scale of this deal will intensify pressure on other cloud providers and ecommerce giants. Google, Microsoft and Alibaba are already racing to deliver AI-powered retail experiences, but few have publicly committed to infrastructure investments of this magnitude. For Amazon, hosting OpenAI’s workloads brings the company’s retail and cloud strategies closer together. That could potentially give its shopping ecosystem prompt access to frontier-grade AI capabilities.
At its core, the deal underscores that computing is the new logistics. Just as physical supply-chain capacity once defined who could deliver fastest, the ability to process, reason and generate at scale will also define who can serve customers smartest.
Technological demands
Ecommerce companies that plug into these AI systems — whether through Bedrock, API integrations or embedded chat interfaces — will be able to automate merchandising, generate product content and optimize fulfillment in real time. Smaller retailers and distributors that adopt AWS-hosted AI models could compete on sophistication without owning their own supercomputers.
But economics will matter. Large-scale AI comes with enormous cost and energy demands. Retailers will need to prove that AI-driven personalization and agentic workflows deliver measurable ROI in conversion, retention, and supply-chain efficiency.
The OpenAI-AWS alliance marks a turning point where the infrastructure behind AI and the mechanics of ecommerce begin to merge. Massive computer clusters are becoming as critical to online retail as distribution centers once were.
By securing AWS as its infrastructure backbone, OpenAI gains the scale to push generative and agentic AI into every layer of digital commerce — from customer chat to order orchestration. For retailers, brands and distributors, that means the future of shopping will be powered not just by algorithms — but by the world’s most advanced computer grid.
Sign up
Sign up for a complimentary subscription to Digital Commerce 360 B2B News. It covers technology and business trends in the growing B2B ecommerce industry. Contact Mark Brohan, senior vice president of B2B and Market Research, at mark@digitalcommerce360.com. Follow him on Twitter @markbrohan. Follow us on LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), Facebook and YouTube.
Favorite