penAI is continuing to rope tech giants into its historical infrastructure buildout.

The company announced a $38 billion deal with Amazon on Monday to utilize its cloud computing services for advanced AI workloads over the next seven years. The partnership gives OpenAI access to hundreds of thousands more Nvidia GPUs, as well as tens of millions of CPUs, “to rapidly scale agentic workloads.”

OpenAI has been a dealmaking machine over the past several months.

• The company announced an expansion of Project Stargate in partnership with Oracle and Softbank worth $400 billion in late September. In the same week, Nvidia announced an investment in the firm worth $100 billion.
• Its other deals include a $100 billion partnership with AMD, a $300 billion deal with Oracle, and a partnership with Broadcom, for which the financial terms weren’t disclosed.

“AI infrastructure continues to be a key battleground for growth, which benefits cloud providers, chipmakers, and data center operators that can meet the demand,” Ido Caspi, research analyst at Global X, told The Deep View. “The move also reflects OpenAI’s strategic effort to diversify its dependencies beyond a single vendor in Microsoft.”

But for all of its pomp and circumstance, OpenAI has yet to turn a profit. Though CEO Sam Altman claimed last week that the company’s revenue is “well above” the reported figure of $13 billion a year, Microsoft’s earnings last week showed that OpenAI posted an $11.5 billion loss in the quarter.

However, through these varied deals totaling more than a trillion in commitments, the company may be seeking to maintain “the appearance that they’re too big to fail,” Scott Bickley, an advisory fellow at Info-Tech Research Group, told The Deep View. “They're tying the fortunes of everyone else to theirs, to some degree.”

To keep floating on, however, OpenAI is funding these buildouts “through a lot of creativity and different deal structures” that prevent it from having to cough up cash immediately, Bickley noted.

“They're building this hype cycle narrative, and it's driving their ability to raise funds and their ability to do big deals,” said Bickley. “They’re keeping this narrative going between now and IPO, that’s the key strategy.”

Our Deeper View

OpenAI has a lot of big dreams. But clearly, those dreams cost a whole lot of cash. While it’s trying its hand at a few ways of making returns, such as ecommerce, ads and search, as it stands, they may be “buying themselves runway” with the hope of realizing its potential someday, Bickley said. If OpenAI is unable to reach those heights, “There'll be a lot of other players that pay the price for their inability to realize those goals,” he said.