Amazon in talks to invest $10B+ in OpenAI alongside commerce partnership discussions
Dec 17, 2025
Key Points
- Amazon is in talks to invest over $10 billion in OpenAI at a valuation above $500 billion, with the cash investment designed to help OpenAI pay for a separate $38 billion AWS server commitment.
- Amazon is negotiating commerce partnership terms with OpenAI, seeking to prevent ChatGPT from becoming a product discovery hub that would cannibalize Amazon's $60 billion advertising business.
- OpenAI is expected to use Amazon's Trainium AI chips as part of the deal, positioning the custom silicon as a potential alternative to NVIDIA hardware in OpenAI's infrastructure.
Summary
Amazon is in talks to invest over $10 billion in OpenAI at a valuation above $500 billion, according to reporting from Katie Roof. The investment would be in cash rather than AWS credits, though it comes alongside OpenAI's separate $38 billion commitment to rent servers from AWS over seven years.
The structure has a circular quality. OpenAI announced the massive AWS spending commitment last month, and now Amazon is investing $10 billion to help OpenAI afford those very commitments. One framing likens it to a rebate—Amazon offers servers, OpenAI commits to buy them, and Amazon takes a stake in the proceeds.
Commerce integration
The talks also include discussion of commerce partnership opportunities. OpenAI has been working to turn ChatGPT into a shopping hub and earn fees for referring customers to retailers. It has already struck referral deals with Etsy and Shopify, but notably has not yet done a deal with Amazon or eBay.
Amazon has resisted letting what one analyst frames as "the fox into the henhouse" because product search on Amazon is extremely profitable. If consumers start asking ChatGPT instead of searching Amazon directly, Amazon risks losing control of the discovery experience and the high-margin advertising that comes with it.
Amazon's advertising business is now projected to generate $60 billion in revenue and is growing far faster than core retail. A referral fee from OpenAI traffic might pale compared to the advertising revenue Amazon would sacrifice if ChatGPT becomes the starting point for product discovery instead of Amazon's own app or search results.
Trainium chip placement
The deal also positions Amazon's Trainium AI chips as a potential alternative to the NVIDIA hardware OpenAI primarily uses today. As part of the investment discussions, OpenAI is expected to use Trainium chips. The specifics remain unclear—whether OpenAI will run specific models on Trainium, set up hardware-agnostic abstraction layers, or carve out dedicated workloads like video generation is uncertain.
Building true hardware abstraction is difficult because model architectures are typically co-designed with the silicon they run on, as with Google's TPU and Gemini teams. Anthropic has maintained a multi-platform approach, though that remains the exception rather than the norm.