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OpenAI in Talks With Amazon About Investment That Could Exceed $10 Billion (cnbc.com) 39

Posted by msmash from the circular-economy dept.
OpenAI is in discussions with Amazon about a potential investment and an agreement to use its AI chips, CNBC confirmed on Tuesday. From the report: The details are fluid and still subject to change but the investment could exceed $10 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the talks are confidential. The discussions come after OpenAI completed a restructuring in October and formally outlined the details of its partnership with Microsoft, giving it more freedom to raise capital and partner with companies across the broader AI ecosystem.

Microsoft has invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI and backed the company since 2019, but it no longer has a right of first refusal to be OpenAI's compute provider, according to an October release. OpenAI can now also develop some products with third parties. Amazon has invested at least $8 billion into OpenAI rival Anthropic, but the e-commerce giant could be looking to expand its exposure to the booming generative AI market. Microsoft has taken a similar step and announced last month that it will invest up to $5 billion into Anthropic, while Nvidia will invest up to $10 billion in the startup.
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OpenAI in Talks With Amazon About Investment That Could Exceed $10 Billion More

OpenAI in Talks With Amazon About Investment That Could Exceed $10 Billion

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  • amazing (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I have never seen any evidence of actual engineering intelligence in Sam Alt-man but that individual certainly seems to have a genetic gift for finding money.

  • What the hell is going on here? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by supabeast! ( 84658 ) on Wednesday December 17, 2025 @10:29AM (#65864039)

    So Amazon is going to give money to OpenAI so OpenAI can buy chips from Amazon. And Nvidia is giving OpenAI money to buy chips from Nvidia. And AMD is doing some weird thing giving OpenAI stock warrants so OpenAI can sell the stock and buy chips from AMD. How the hell is Sam Altman convincing people to keep this house of cards standing? Is he really a genius running a company so amazing that this makes sense behind closed doors?

    And how is OpenAI making its code work well on all these different platforms? Everybody else seems to be writing their code to run on one architecture. Does OpenAI have three teams of programmers adapting their latest code to work on three chip architectures?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by GoTeam ( 5042081 )

      And how is OpenAI making its code work well on all these different platforms? Everybody else seems to be writing their code to run on one architecture. Does OpenAI have three teams of programmers adapting their latest code to work on three chip architectures?

      I'd guess that they'll have their AI make the alterations on its own. I'm hoping it'll accidentally make a new version of qbasic Gorilla instead.

    • So Amazon is going to give money to OpenAI so OpenAI can buy chips from Amazon. And Nvidia is giving OpenAI money to buy chips from Nvidia. And AMD is doing some weird thing giving OpenAI stock warrants so OpenAI can sell the stock and buy chips from AMD. How the hell is Sam Altman convincing people to keep this house of cards standing? Is he really a genius running a company so amazing that this makes sense behind closed doors?

      From the outside, the entire AI spending spree looks very much like a giant capitalistic circle-jerk. Maybe a few people get their rocks off, but in the end, nothing of value is actually made. It's just massive piles of money circling around and around through the same circle of douchebags, all so that they can *say* their earning massive piles of money, while in reality it's just the same few millions / billions, circling through the same hands, over, and over, and over, and over. There's no actual end-pro

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by SumDog ( 466607 )
        It's the absence of Capitalism. With Capitalism and without fiat currency and fractional reserve bullshit, they would have all collapsed by now. But now the Gooberment owns 10% of Intel (literally 10% socialism) just like the government bailed out all the failing private industry in 2008 (literally 100% socialism). You can't have pure Capitalism without some regulation to ensure there is real competition and standards so there's no sawdust in the food or Chinese collapsing bridges, but we need way more of i

    • Re:What the hell is going on here? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by JoshuaZ ( 1134087 ) on Wednesday December 17, 2025 @11:54AM (#65864357) Homepage
      This looks pretty close to what the rail boom of the late 1860s and early 1870s looked like. Some corporations and investors then did some pretty incestuous stuff of a similar. The resulting bubble pop was devastating to the US economy. But it is notable that even as that bubble popped, the overall amount of rail continued to grow, with almost every major metric (amount of track laid down, number of passenger-miles traveled per a month, number of locomotives, number of overall stations, etc.) barely showing blips as they continued to climb.

  • This all powerfully reminds me of the deals the big banks like Lehman Brothers and Bear Sterns struck back in 2006 and 2007. If you're too young to remember that particular shitshow, the mortgage industry was fundamentally toxic and a bunch of securities were created by mushing bad mortgages in with good ones so that the combination looked secure enough to invest in.

    And then THOSE securities were subdivided up and repackaged into even more securities. And so on. And so on.

    Bad debt ended up "infecting" th

    • If the Fed had bailed out Lehman, would contagion ever have started infecting the hedges, which turned out in the end to be valid once the irrational, emotional panic set off by Lehman's failure stopped, due to outright Fed money printing?

      • It is not the responsibility of government to protect companies from their own incompetence. Bush letting Lehman die was the only good thing he did during the meltdown. He should have continued with the rest of them.

        It's called the free market for a reason. If you continually thwart the free market it's no longer free, is it?

        • Why not print an indexed basic income so you can let big banks fail without affecting incomes of little guys who were not responsible yet bear the brunt of the big guys' failures?

          • Making the little guys suffer is all part of how the system works. If you have workers that are broke and desperate, then the labor market is in surplus and it keeps wages down. Plus you don't have to be nice to your employees.
            For the middle class, trimming a bit off the top of their retirement savings is very profitable. They simply have to accept a lower standard of living in retirement, possibly working past retirement age. Again this is very good for business.

            • Should the public Fed work for us by printing an indexed basic income?

              • Possibly a solution, possibly not. UBI in general tends to be more effective the broader it is applied. Attempting to test it in an isolate sub-group of the population has inconsistent results.

                Philosophically, I tend to lean more towards offering standardized services instead of giving money out and letting people compete in a poorly regulated free market for those necessities.

                In the future I suspect we'll see a mix of solutions, rather than a one size fits all. With basic income for expenses that individua

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by DarkOx ( 621550 )

          Exactly AIG never should have got a bailout.

          I honestly thought Bush was/had been doing a fairly good job up until the point he turned his back capitalism.

          • What if the insurance investments AIG made were really fine because defaults never reached the levels panicky traders thought they might?

            Does the capitalism you reference generate noisy prices such that any rational price signals are just overwhelmed, by psychological noise?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by TGK ( 262438 )

        The infection was already there. Anyone who'd invested in any mortgage derived securities was compromised because the underwriting and scoring process was fundamentally fraudulent. Securities are rated and, at least in theory, those ratings are supposed to reflect the degree of risk. But the scoring agencies essentially became captives of the folks minting the securities and just handed out great ratings like halloween candy.

        The Fed and the money printing and all that -- concerning as it all was -- reall

        • Is there plenty of infection right now (remember SVB?), but have we learned that the Fed can avert pure panics like in 2008 by bailing out immediately? Again, if the Fed had not made a political decision to let Lehman's fail, wouldn't you traders have muddled through without the fire sales, because the Fed had your back?

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by DarkOx ( 621550 )

          utter nonsense.

          There was no real problem sidelining as many people during the pandemic and similarly the economy even the economics of places like NOVA and DC during government shut downs was not collapse.

          Any landlord with sense would have waited to start evictions knowing their usually in good standing tenants who are late this month likely have a temporary reason. State and Locals could have found a way to make food-stamps or something like it availible to ensure groceries got purchased.

          It was in no way n

  • Apparently, the whole thing is an overture by OpenAI to have a discussion with the Alexa team on how to successfully monetize ChatGPT.

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