Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, speaking with CNBC at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 20, 2026.
CNBC
Amazon is in talks to invest up to $50 billion in OpenAI, CNBC confirmed on Thursday, in a significant vote of confidence from the e-commerce giant after it invested in one of the startup’s biggest rivals.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy have been engaging in direct discussions, according to a source familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the details are confidential.
Amazon has pumped billions of dollars into OpenAI competitor Anthropic since 2023.
The details of Amazon’s talks with OpenAI are still fluid and the final total is subject to change, but the term sheet could be signed in the coming weeks, the person said.
A representative for Amazon declined to comment. The Wall Street Journal was the first to report the $50 billion figure.
OpenAI is also engaging in fundraising discussions with other investors, and the total round could close at around $100 billion, the person said. Altman was in the United Arab Emirates to participate in investment talks with sovereign wealth funds last week, as CNBC previously reported.
The startup’s funding round could close in two parts, beginning with investments from strategics like Amazon, Microsoft and Nvidia, the person said. Other contributions from participants like SoftBank, which is in talks to invest up to $30 billion in OpenAI, would follow, the source said.
The startup was founded as a nonprofit research lab in 2015, and exploded onto the mainstream in 2022 after launching its generative AI chatbot ChatGPT. OpenAI has grown into one of the largest commercial entities on the planet, and its valuation swelled to $500 billion in October after it finalized a secondary share sale.
Amazon and OpenAI have been in talks about a potential investment since last year, and the final deal could include an agreement to use Amazon’s AI chips, as CNBC previously reported.
Anthropic was founded by a group of former OpenAI executives and researchers, including CEO Dario Amodei, in 2021. The company is best known for its family of AI models called Claude, and it closed a multibillion-dollar funding round at a $350 billion valuation earlier this month.
Amazon Web Services was named Anthropic’s primary cloud provider in 2023 and its primary training partner in 2024. It continues to serve in both of those roles.
Amazon has been cutting costs across its business to invest more in AI and the rapid build-out of data centers.
On Wednesday, Amazon announced it would cut about 16,000 corporate employees, marking its second round of mass job cuts since last October.
Last October, Amazon opened an $11 billion data center campus for Anthropic in Indiana, called Project Rainier.
Amazon said that same month that it expects capital expenditures to reach $125 billion for 2026, the highest spending forecast among the megacap companies at the time.
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