Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Tuesday afternoon announced a significant expansion of its partnership with OpenAI, which will allow its customers to access OpenAI’s leading AI systems via Amazon’s cloud-computing platforms.
The expansion, announced at a high-profile event with AWS and OpenAI leadership called “What’s Next for AWS,” gives OpenAI access to a vast new pool of potential users and to Amazon’s dominant cloud-computing capabilities, just as it redoubles its push toward enterprise clients.
The move comes as many companies are increasingly looking to agents — AI capable of taking on and executing relatively complex tasks — as a way to boost employee productivity and automate rote chores.
“Enterprises want to build with the most capable AI models and agents available,” AWS said in a statement announcing the partnership. “They also need the security posture, operational maturity, and data governance that production workloads demand. Starting today, we are bringing those together.”
On Monday, OpenAI announced that it reached a deal with its longtime exclusive cloud-computing partner, Microsoft, to be able to sell its AI systems with different computing providers. Microsoft is a major investor in OpenAI and receives 20% of the AI company's revenue as part of their relationship.
“Today, we are announcing an amended agreement to simplify our partnership and the way we work together, grounded in flexibility, certainty, and a focus on delivering the benefits of AI broadly,” OpenAI said in its Monday announcement. OpenAI will continue to pay the revenue share to Microsoft through 2030.
Monday's agreement opened the door to Tuesday’s announcement with AWS, which will now incorporate OpenAI’s leading systems — like its new GPT-5.5 and coding-oriented Codex models — into its Amazon Bedrock cloud computing service.
Many tech stocks slid southward on Tuesday after The Wall Street Journal published a report that an OpenAI leader had privately expressed worries about the company missing its revenue and user targets. Steve Sharpe, OpenAI’s head of business and financial communications, told NBC News that the company is “on an extremely steep growth curve across consumer, enterprise and developers.”
AWS also announced a significant update to its Quick personal AI assistant, launching a stand-alone desktop app along with increased connectivity to many workplace software tools like Zoom and Salesforce.
Both OpenAI and Anthropic launched their own desktop apps in recent months, which can give users extra flexibility to apply AI features or analysis to documents or tools on their local computers.
Amazon’s Quick, which was originally launched in October, is already used by companies like BMW, the NFL and Southwest Airlines. Tuesday’s announcement emphasized Quick’s personalized and agentic abilities, allowing the tool to learn which contacts are most relevant for a specific user.
"Unlike AI of the past, these assistants have a deeper understanding of what I use as a tools in my laptop and what could work across various threads," said Swami Sivasubramanian, the vice president of agentic AI at AWS, noting that he and a team of six principal scientists created the personalized desktop assistant in three months.
AWS CEO Matt Garman echoed the sentiment during Tuesday’s event: “AI and agentic development has completely transformed what is possible in the software development world," Garman said. "It really is just incredible, both in creating software [and] in operating software."
AWS, which is a subsidiary of the larger Amazon corporation, undergirds a huge swath of global internet infrastructure, providing key computing, storage and networking capabilities to millions of businesses around the world. AWS is an economic engine for Amazon, providing 18% of Amazon’s overall sales and over half of Amazon’s income in 2025.
AWS has embraced AI in recent years, creating its own generative AI model called Nova and designing its own chips geared for AI cloud computing applications.
With its immense computing capabilities and new generation of custom chips, Amazon has recently inked notable deals with some of the biggest names in America’s AI industry.
On Friday, AWS announced it would sell “tens of millions” of its latest chips to Meta as part of the Facebook-owner’s renewed AI push. Last Monday, AWS also announced a $100 billion commitment from Anthropic over the next 10 years, securing access to Amazon’s custom AI chips and related processors. And in February, Amazon announced it would invest $50 billion in OpenAI, building on their existing $38 billion agreement announced in November.
