OpenAI has signed a $38bn (£29bn) deal to use Amazon infrastructure to operate its artificial intelligence products, as part of a more than $1tn spending spree on computing power.
The agreement with Amazon Web Services means OpenAI will be able to use AWS datacentres, and the Nvidia chips inside them, immediately.
Last week, OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, said his company had committed to spending $1.4tn on AI infrastructure, amid concerns over the sustainability of the boom in using and building datacentres. These are the central nervous systems of AI tools such as ChatGPT.
“Scaling frontier AI requires massive, reliable compute,” Altman said on Monday. “Our partnership with AWS strengthens the broad compute ecosystem that will power this next era and bring advanced AI to everyone.”
OpenAI said the deal would give it access to hundreds of thousands of Nvidia graphics processors to train and run its AI models. Amazon plans to use the chips in data clusters that will power ChatGPT’s responses and train OpenAI’s next wave of models, the companies said.
Matt Garman, the chief executive of AWS, said OpenAI continued to push the boundaries of what was possible and that Amazon’s infrastructure would serve as a backbone for its ambitions.
OpenAI is committed to developing 30 gigawatts of computing resources – enough to power roughly 25 million US homes.
Last week, OpenAI said it had converted its main business into a for-profit corporation as part of a reorganisation that valued the startup at $500bn. Its longtime backer Microsoft will have a roughly 27% stake in OpenAI’s new for-profit corporation.
The race for computing power by AI companies has raised concerns among some market watchers about how it will be paid for. OpenAI’s annual revenue is about $13bn, according the Financial Times, a figure dwarfed by its $1.4tn infrastructure commitment. Other datacentre deals signed by OpenAI include a $300bn agreement with the US company Oracle.
Altman hit back at the spending concerns during a podcast appearance with the Microsoft chief executive, Satya Nadella, saying “enough” to a question from the host, the US investor Brad Gerstner, about the gap between OpenAI’s revenue and its infrastructure commitments.
Altman said OpenAI made “well more” revenue than the reported $13bn, without specifying a number. He added: “I just – enough … I think there’s are a lot of people who would love to buy OpenAI shares.”
Analysts at the US investment bank Morgan Stanley estimate that global spending on datacentres will reach nearly $3tn between now and 2028. They said half of that spending would be covered by the big US tech companies and the rest would come from sources such as the private credit market, a growing part of the shadow banking sector that is raising concerns at the Bank of England and elsewhere.
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