Amazon reportedly in talks to invest $10B in OpenAI as circular deals stay popular

Amazon is in early discussions to invest as much as $10 billion in OpenAI in a deal that would see the AI lab using the e-commerce giant’s AI chips, CNBC reported.

If it materializes, the deal would value OpenAI at more than $500 billion, Bloomberg reported, citing an anonymous source.

Amazon has been looking to diversify its bets in the AI race, which has so far seen it partner up and invest $8 billion in Anthropic, a rival to OpenAI. The e-commerce giant earlier this month also unveiled the latest iteration in its Trainium series of chips, and outlined the development of the next installment of those chips, complementing its cloud computing offerings via Amazon Web Services.

News of the deal comes a couple months after OpenAI completed its transition to a for-profit model, which gives it more freedom to strike deals with investors other than Microsoft, one of the company’s earliest backers with a stake of 27%.

Amazon investing in OpenAI would mark the latest in a series of circular deals in the AI space — major hardware manufacturers and cloud providers strike deals with young AI companies to use their products, while the upstarts commit to using their data centers and chips for training their AI models.

This past March, OpenAI invested $350 million of equity into CoreWeave, which used the funds to buy chips from its backer Nvidia. Those same chips provide compute to OpenAI, which increases CoreWeave’s revenue and in the end makes OpenAI’s stake more valuable. Then in October, OpenAI signed a deal to pick up a 10% stake in AMD and committed to using the chipmaker’s AI GPUs, and also signed a chip usage agreement with Broadcom that month. And in November, the ChatGPT maker signed a $38 billion cloud computing deal with Amazon.

OpenAI and Amazon did not immediately respond to requests for comment.