Amazon finished funding its $50 billion stake in OpenAI on July 31, closing a deal announced five months ago in February. Per Amazon’s quarterly SEC filing, the money moved in three chunks: $15 billion in Q1, $13.7 billion in Q2, and a final $21.3 billion sometime after June 30.
That last tranche is the interesting one. The February term sheet tied the remaining $35 billion to conditions that reportedly included OpenAI going public or hitting AGI. OpenAI hasn’t filed an S-1. Amazon didn’t say in the filing which box got checked, or if the trigger got waived.
What Amazon bought: exclusivity. AWS became the sole third-party cloud provider for OpenAI’s Frontier enterprise program, and the two expanded an existing $38 billion AWS agreement by $100 billion over eight years, covering roughly 2 gigawatts of Trainium chip capacity.
Nvidia pledged up to $100 billion to OpenAI in a similar structure last year: capital tied to compute deployment, not a clean equity check. Amazon’s deal follows the same shape. Both hyperscalers are getting paid twice on OpenAI, once on the stake, once on every GPU-hour billed back through their own cloud.
OpenAI, for its part, is still growing into the money. ChatGPT is closing in on 1 billion weekly users, seven months behind its own schedule but still one of the fastest climbs to that scale in internet history. Whether that usage turns into revenue before the next funding round is the question Amazon’s filing doesn’t answer.
— Diana Kowalski