Amazon’s latest financial report reveals that the company has completed a total investment of $50 billion in the developer of ChatGPT, OpenAI, and acquired approximately 5% of the AI company.
This investment was divided into two stages. In February of this year, as part of expanding their commercial cooperation, Amazon first invested $15 billion. At that time, the two parties clearly agreed that if OpenAI achieved an IPO or made significant breakthroughs in AI technology, Amazon would make an additional investment of $35 billion.
However, according to Amazon’s financial performance report released on July 31 (this Friday), even though the above two conditions have not been met, Amazon has fully paid the remaining funds. This significant funding has been provided to OpenAI, which is still in a state of deficit, to support its costly AI model training and maintain competitiveness with Anthropic, Google, and Chinese competitors.
Insiders say that OpenAI has received the $35 billion investment this week, officially raising Amazon’s stake to approximately 5%.
Amazon is currently adopting a dual betting strategy in the field of AI. In addition to OpenAI, Amazon is also strongly supporting its competitor, Anthropic, and has committed to investing $33 billion in Anthropic (of which $18 billion has been delivered).
Amazon is using these two top AI companies to drive the market adoption of its Trainium chip, directly competing with hardware leaders like Nvidia and Google’s TPU. At the same time, this also ensures that AWS cloud customers can smoothly utilize the most advanced models from these two AI labs.