Tech company Amazon is reportedly planning to invest in OpenAI, according to Reuters. The deal could value the artificial intelligence company at over $500 billion.
The update comes at a time when OpenAI is planning an IPO for 2026, which is expected to value the company over a trillion dollars.
While exact figures are not clear, estimates peg the Amazon investment to be $10 billion.
Initially, OpenAI was founded as a non-profit, and a PBC arm was created in 2019 to allow the firm to raise capital, a part of the organization in which Microsoft disclosed a 27% stake.
PBC is a business model that allows a company to maintain its goal of making a positive social impact while also making a profit at the same time.
If Amazon invests, it will be committing financial resources to a firm that is rapidly burning through massive amounts of cash.
Although the company does not publicly disclose its financial reports, leaked documents, according to Tech Crunch, say that it has burned through $8.65 billion in inference costs—that is, the costs involved in running the company’s LLMs. In 2024, inference costs were $3.8 billion.
The Amazon investment could lead to more fundraising in the future. At the time of writing, Amazon’s shares were trading at $222.56.
Jeff Bezos continues to broaden his involvement in AI, whether it’s indirectly through billion-dollar investments committed towards data center infrastructure or his becoming co-CEO of Prometheus.