OpenAI raises $110B and splits its cloud business between Amazon and Microsoft

What Happened

OpenAI announced a $110 billion funding round on February 27, 2026, drawing from three investors: Amazon ($50 billion), SoftBank ($30 billion), and Nvidia ($30 billion). The round values OpenAI at $840 billion post-money — above all but a handful of public companies globally — making it the largest private fundraise in history, according to CNBC.

The Amazon investment is the structural centerpiece. Per the official Amazon press release, AWS becomes the exclusive third-party cloud distributor for OpenAI Frontier — an enterprise platform OpenAI launched in February 2026 for building, deploying, and managing teams of AI agents. Amazon and OpenAI are also co-developing a Stateful Runtime Environment, expected to launch within months, and OpenAI has committed to 2 gigawatts of Amazon's custom Trainium AI chips (Trainium3 and Trainium4). Alongside the equity round, the deal includes a separate 8-year infrastructure agreement worth $100 billion in compute spend — a distinct figure, not a subset of the $110 billion.

One conditionality worth flagging: Amazon's $50 billion is not a single unconditional check. An initial $15 billion has been committed, while the remaining $35 billion is contingent on OpenAI meeting undisclosed milestones or completing an IPO, per SEC filings cited by Latent Space. Microsoft, which has invested approximately $13 billion in OpenAI over multiple years, was notably absent from this new funding round — though it retains its existing Azure partnership.

Why It Matters

The dollar figures command attention, but the more consequential development is what the Amazon deal reveals about the architecture of enterprise AI going forward.

Most people encounter AI as a question-and-answer transaction: a user sends input, the model responds, and the exchange ends. Each interaction starts fresh. This is called stateless access, and it is the model that has defined AI APIs since their inception. Azure's exclusivity with OpenAI has operated on this basis — Microsoft serves API requests, delivers the response, and the context is cleared.

Stateful access works differently. A stateful AI agent retains memory across sessions: it knows what it did yesterday, can pick up a multi-step task where it left off, and can operate autonomously over hours or days without a human re-briefing it at each step. For complex enterprise workflows — supply chain monitoring, legal review, customer service pipelines — this persistent context is the difference between a useful tool and a genuine autonomous system. OpenAI's Frontier platform is designed for exactly this use case, and AWS will be the exclusive third-party cloud through which businesses access it, delivered via Amazon Bedrock, according to InfoQ's technical analysis.

Microsoft is not cut out. Its Azure relationship continues for stateless API access, and that is a substantial business. But the stateful layer — the one where persistent AI agents actually operate — has been handed to Amazon. "Combining OpenAI's models with Amazon's infrastructure and global reach helps us put powerful AI into the hands of businesses and users at real scale," said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy added: "We continue to be impressed with what OpenAI is building, and we're excited about their choosing to go big on our custom AI silicon."

OpenAI currently reports 900 million weekly users and 9 million paying business customers. The Information projects $157 billion in cash burn through 2028; this round is explicitly sized to cover that runway. At $840 billion post-money, the company's ability to sustain that spend now rests significantly on a conditional investment and an infrastructure relationship with a cloud competitor to its original backer.