Sam Altman’s brooch to competitors is very hot, and includes a new partnership with Amazon Web Services.
Amazon announced on Tuesday that new models will be available on AWS as Openai unveiled two Open-Weight Reasoning models with equivalent features as the O-series. The company confirmed with TechCrunch that this is the first time the Openai model has been offered by AWS. These are available as model selections for Amazon AI Service Bedrock and Sagemaker AI.
Although models can be downloaded via Hugging Face, Amazon offers these models with full knowledge and approval of Openai, as Dmitry Pimenov, the model manufacturer’s product lead, is shown in the announcement. The spokesman described the service as similar to how Amazon offered its open model DeepSeek-R1 earlier this year.
This is a juicy and competitive move for both companies. In the case of AWS, we place the Cloud giant in the same sentence as Openai, the largest model maker.
To date, AWS was best known as the leading host and financial aid for Anthropic’s Claude, one of Openai’s biggest competitors. AWS offers Claude along with other models from manufacturers such as Cohere, Deepseek, Meta, Mistral, and unique models of AI services. Specifically, Bedrock allows AWS customers to build and host generated AI apps using the model of their choice. Sagemaker, on the other hand, allows AWS customers to train or even build their own AI models, primarily for the use of analytics.
While Microsoft, AWS’ ultimate rival, hasn’t locked its Openai models since January, Azure is the most important cloud partner to date. Openai has announced that Microsoft is also offering versions of these two new models, optimized for Windows devices.
Watching Microsoft win an increasing number of cloud business in Openai was a pain in the neck of Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon. Last week, during Amazon’s quarterly revenue call, Jassy was slammed by analysts on Wall Street with questions about how the company has lost its position to its competitors, especially Microsoft.
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For example, JPMorgan analyst Doug Anmuth asked Jassy to mention Microsoft and Google, explaining that “cloud growth will be significantly faster between the second and third players in space.” Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Novac then told Jussey that Wall Street believes “AWS is behind Genai, having concerns about stock losses, peers and more.”
Jassy responded with a few minutes of Diatribe, including this barb from Redmond. “I think the second player is about 65% of the size of AWS.”
Meanwhile, another AWS competitor, Oracle, reported that it has signed a $30 billion annual contract with Openai to provide Data Center services. This means Openai plans to pay Oracle every year more than combine its customers from all other cloud services. Until now, AWS has been excluded from Openai-related glory.
On how such a move with AWS will benefit Openai: The relationship between AI providers and Microsoft is notoriously tense as they are reportedly renegotiating a long-term partnership deal. What is the better way for Openai to strengthen its position than working with the largest cloud providers, even at a small scale, initially?
Additionally, this partnership allows AWS Enterprise customers to easily experiment with using Openai models in AI apps hosted by them.
Meanwhile, Altman undercuts Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg in this move as well. Once Openai released these two high-performance models under the Apache 2.0 open source license, Meta recently confirmed that it will not continue to open all of its probably future “Superintelligence” models.
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