Amazon is reportedly in talks to invest $50B in OpenAI

OpenAI, which is already valued at roughly $500 billion, is reportedly seeking as much as $100 billion in additional funding — a raise that could push the company’s valuation to around $830 billion. According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, Amazon is in talks to invest at least $50 billion in that massive funding round.

Details of the potential investment remain limited. The Journal reports that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is personally leading discussions with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. TechCrunch has reached out to both Amazon and OpenAI for comment, but neither company has publicly confirmed the talks.

As OpenAI seeks additional capital, it has reportedly been in discussions with sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East. Separately, The New York Times has reported that OpenAI has held talks with several major technology and investment players, including Nvidia, Microsoft, and SoftBank. The funding round is expected to close by the end of the first quarter.

A potential partnership between Amazon and OpenAI would be notable given Amazon’s deep and ongoing relationship with Anthropic, one of OpenAI’s chief competitors. Amazon Web Services serves as Anthropic’s primary cloud and model-training provider, and Amazon has invested at least $8 billion in the AI startup. More recently, Amazon opened an $11 billion data centre campus in Indiana designed to run Anthropic’s models exclusively.

If finalised, an Amazon investment in OpenAI would further underscore the intensifying competition among major technology companies to secure strategic positions in the AI ecosystem — even as alliances increasingly overlap in a rapidly consolidating market.