Artificial intelligence giant OpenAI has officially announced an unprecedented partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), jointly launching two brand-new open-source reasoning models that are comparable in performance to its "O series." According to Dmitry Pimenov, OpenAI's model product manager, these models have been launched on AWS, marking AWS's first official provision of OpenAI models. This move not only dropped a major bomb in the cloud computing market but also intensified the fierce competition among tech giants in the AI field.

These two new models are now available as options within Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker AI services for all AWS customers. Although users can also download these models through Hugging Face, Amazon clearly stated that this collaboration was fully informed and approved by OpenAI, similar to the previous open-source model DeepSeek-R1.

OpenAI

This collaboration holds significant strategic importance for both OpenAI and AWS.

For AWS:

For a long time, AWS has been known for being the main host and funder of Anthropic, OpenAI's main competitor. Although AWS's AI platform Bedrock and SageMaker include models from companies such as Cohere, DeepSeek, Meta, and Mistral, it has never directly introduced top-tier OpenAI models in the industry. This collaboration finally allows AWS to establish a direct connection with OpenAI, responding to Wall Street analysts' criticisms that it lags behind Microsoft and Google in the AI field. Just last week, during the earnings call, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy gave a lengthy and intense critique of Microsoft.

For OpenAI:

This move is undoubtedly a clever strategy by OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman on multiple fronts.

  • Strategic counterbalance to Microsoft: Although Microsoft Azure remains OpenAI's most important cloud partner, the relationship between the two companies is reportedly becoming increasingly tense. By partnering with the world's largest cloud service provider AWS, OpenAI effectively strengthens its market position and adds leverage for future negotiations.

  • Deep connections with AWS customers: This collaboration enables a large number of AWS enterprise customers to more easily integrate OpenAI models into their existing AI applications, bringing significant business opportunities.

  • Public challenge to Meta: The newly released models are licensed under the Apache 2.0 open-source license, which contrasts sharply with Meta's recent announcement that it may no longer open-source all of its future "superintelligent" models, subtly hitting Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

At the same time, Oracle, another major competitor of AWS, has also signed a data center service agreement with OpenAI worth up to $3 billion annually. It can be seen that OpenAI is actively building a diversified cloud service ecosystem to ensure its technology reaches a broader user base and maximizes its strategic flexibility.