Sam Altman's recent criticism of rivals has extended to a newly announced partnership with Amazon Web Services.
As disclosed by OpenAI, two open-weight reasoning models with capabilities matching its o-series family will be available on AWS starting Tuesday. This marks the first time AWS will offer OpenAI models, which TechCrunch has verified. The models will be integrated into Amazon's Bedrock and SageMaker AI services.
While these models are publicly downloadable via Hugging Face, Amazon's provision of them occurs with OpenAI's full awareness and approval, as stated by OpenAI's product lead Dmitry Pimenov in the official announcement. A spokesperson described this arrangement as analogous to Amazon's recent provision of the open model DeepSeek-R1.
This strategic move intensifies competition between the two companies. For AWS, it represents a significant step in aligning with OpenAI, the leading model developer, for the first time.
AWS is best known for hosting Anthropic's Claude - one of OpenAI's major competitors - and providing financial backing for its development. The cloud giant already offers Claude alongside models from Cohere, DeepSeek, Meta, Mistral, and its own AI portfolio. Bedrock enables AWS clients to build and deploy generative AI applications using selected models, while SageMaker focuses on analytical model training and development.
Microsoft's exclusive access to OpenAI models ended in January, though Azure remains OpenAI's primary cloud partner. Notably, OpenAI recently announced Microsoft will optimize both new models specifically for Windows devices.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy's public struggles against Microsoft's AI dominance were evident during last week's earnings call. Analysts relentlessly questioned how AWS is losing cloud market share to competitors like Microsoft.
J.P. Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth asked Jassy about "significantly faster cloud growth among the second and third players" referencing Microsoft and Google. Morgan Stanley's Brian Nowak emphasized that Wall Street perceives AWS as lagging in generative AI adoption and facing market share erosion.
Jassy responded with a multi-minute critique, including a jab at Microsoft: "The second-largest player operates at around 65% of AWS's scale." Meanwhile, Oracle recently secured a $3 billion annual deal with OpenAI for data center services, surpassing all OpenAI's other cloud clients combined. AWS has yet to benefit from any OpenAI-related partnerships.
For OpenAI, this AWS collaboration strategically counters Microsoft while strengthening its position. With reported tensions in its Microsoft partnership negotiations, aligning with the largest cloud provider - albeit initially limited - provides crucial leverage.
The partnership also enables AWS enterprise clients to easily integrate OpenAI models with their AI applications. Notably, OpenAI's release of these high-performance models under Apache 2.0 licensing challenges Meta's recent decision to limit open-sourcing its upcoming "super intelligence" models.
