ISTANBUL

OpenAI announced Monday that it had signed a $38 billion deal to acquire capacity from Amazon's cloud computing platform Amazon Web Services (AWS), marking its first agreement with the cloud infrastructure giant.

OpenAI will start using AWS infrastructure to run workloads immediately, utilizing hundreds of thousands of Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) in the US, with plans to increase capacity over the next few years, according to a statement from OpenAI.

The partnership will "have continued growth" over the next seven years, the statement noted.

"AWS has unusual experience running large-scale AI infrastructure securely, reliably, and at scale – with clusters topping 500K chips. AWS's leadership in cloud infrastructure combined with OpenAI's pioneering advancements in generative AI will help millions of users continue to get value from ChatGPT," it said.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said pushing the boundaries of AI requires large and reliable computing power.

“Our partnership with AWS strengthens the broad compute ecosystem that will power this next era and bring advanced AI to everyone," Altman said.

Amazon's shares were up 4.6% after the announcement.