OpenAI models now available on AWS (
Sam Altman’s blowtorch against his competitors is so hot that it includes a new Amazon Web Services partnership.
OpenAI announced that it would be releasing two open-weight reasoning model with capabilities comparable to its o series. Amazon announced the new models will be available on AWS starting Tuesday. TechCrunch confirmed that this is the first time OpenAI models are offered by AWS. The models will be available with Amazon AI services Bedrock or SageMaker AI.
Although anyone can download these models via Hugging Face. Amazon offers these models with OpenAI’s full knowledge and consent, as Dmitry Pimenov stated in the announcement. A spokesperson compared the offer to Amazon’s earlier offering of open model DeepSeek R1 in this year.
It’s a great move for both companies. AWS is now in the same breath as OpenAI, the largest model maker.
Until recently, AWS was best known as a major hoster and financial backer of Anthropic’s Claude, which is one of OpenAI’s biggest competitors. AWS offers Claude along with models from makers like Cohere and DeepSeek as well as Meta, Mistral, and its own home-grown models in its AI services. AWS Bedrock allows customers to create and host generative AI applications using models of their choosing. SageMaker allows AWS users to build or train their own AI models, primarily for analytics. Azure is OpenAI’s largest cloud partner. Microsoft, AWS’s biggest rival, no longer has a monopoly on OpenAI models. OpenAI announced that Microsoft will also offer versions of these new models optimized for Windows devices. Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon, has publicly complained about Microsoft’s increasing cloud business. Jassy received a barrage of questions from Wall Street analysts during Amazon’s quarterly earningsabout how the company is losing ground to competitors in AI, especially Microsoft.October 27-29, 2025
For instance, JPMorgan analyst Doug Anmuth asked Jassy to explain “significantly faster cloud growth among the number two and number three players in the space,” referring to Microsoft and Google. Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak informed Jassy later that Wall Street believes “AWS is losing ground in GenAI due to concerns about share losses, peers, etc.” OpenAI will pay Oracle more than its other cloud service customers combined. AWS was left out of the OpenAI glory until now.
As to how a move like this with AWS would benefit OpenAI, the AI provider’s relationship is notoriously strained with Microsoft as they are reportedly renegotiating a long-term partnership agreement. What better way to boost OpenAI’s position than to warm up to the largest cloud provider, if only on a small-scale at first?
This partnership also allows AWS enterprise customers to experiment with OpenAI models in their hosted AI applications. Altman also gets to undercut Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg by this move. OpenAI released these two high-performing OpenAI models under the Apache 2.0 open license. Meta recently admitted that they probably won’t open source all their upcoming “superintelligence models”.
