Amazon Bets $200 Billion on AI — While Quietly Stealing OpenAI from Microsoft

Amazon Web Services posted its best quarter in 15 years. AWS revenue rose 28% to over $37 billion — driven almost entirely by AI demand.

Amazon's total AI infrastructure commitment for 2026 stands at $200 billion, the largest single-company AI capex figure in history.
But the more interesting story is what Amazon is doing to Microsoft.
OpenAI — originally built on Microsoft's Azure cloud and backed by $13 billion in Microsoft investment — is increasingly moving toward Amazon. In February, Amazon committed $50 billion to OpenAI. OpenAI, in turn, agreed to use Amazon's custom Trainium chips for AI model training. The two companies are now jointly developing customised models for Amazon's consumer products.

Microsoft still holds a 27% stake in OpenAI's for-profit entity and a massive revenue-sharing agreement.

But the direction of travel is clear. The decade-long Microsoft-OpenAI partnership, once the most consequential relationship in AI, is quietly being renegotiated — with Amazon as the new preferred partner.
AWS's own custom chips — Trainium for training, Inferentia for inference — are also reducing Amazon's dependence on Nvidia, giving it structural cost advantages competitors cannot easily replicate.

The European perspective: Amazon and Microsoft are both facing cloud gatekeeper investigations from European regulators. The OpenAI power shift adds complexity — as OpenAI's models become embedded across both platforms, regulatory scrutiny of AI market concentration in Europe will intensify.