OpenAI has partnered with Amazon Web Services to make its models available on AWS for the first time, marking a significant shift in the competitive landscape of cloud-based AI. The two new open-weight reasoning models from OpenAI, comparable in capability to its proprietary o‑series, are now accessible through AWS’s Bedrock and SageMaker services, the company confirmed.
While these models can already be downloaded via Hugging Face, AWS customers can now integrate them directly into their hosted AI applications with OpenAI’s approval, similar to Amazon’s earlier support for DeepSeek‑R1. The move strengthens AWS’s position in the AI race by adding OpenAI to its portfolio, which already includes Anthropic’s Claude, Cohere, Meta, Mistral, and Amazon’s own AI models.
For OpenAI, this collaboration provides an opportunity to diversify beyond Microsoft, its primary cloud partner to date. Microsoft continues to offer OpenAI’s models, including Windows‑optimized versions of the same newly released models. However, reports suggest the partnership between the two companies is being renegotiated, and working with AWS helps OpenAI gain leverage while reaching a broader enterprise customer base.
The partnership comes amid growing pressure on AWS, which has faced questions from Wall Street analysts over losing ground in generative AI to competitors like Microsoft and Google. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently defended AWS’s position, even as rival Oracle announced a $30 billion annual deal to host OpenAI’s data services.
By integrating OpenAI’s models, AWS customers can more easily experiment with advanced generative AI solutions within their existing infrastructure. At the same time, OpenAI benefits from exposure to AWS’s extensive enterprise client base, while also sending a competitive signal to both Microsoft and Meta. Meta has recently pulled back from fully open‑sourcing its future AI models, whereas OpenAI’s latest models are released under the open Apache 2.0 license.
This marks a notable expansion of OpenAI’s cloud strategy and adds fresh momentum to AWS’s AI offerings at a time of intense competition in the cloud and AI markets.
