OpenAI sees ‘staggering’ demand for Amazon offering, says Microsoft partnership held it back

OpenAI’s partnership with Microsoft helped launch the generative AI era. Now Amazon is bringing the ChatGPT maker further into the booming market for enterprise AI.

That’s the takeaway from an internal memo distributed over the weekend by Denise Dresser, OpenAI’s chief revenue officer. The memo touted the Amazon Web Services alliance as a key enterprise growth driver for the ChatGPT maker, according to a CNBC report.

“Our Microsoft partnership has been foundational to our success. But it has also limited our ability to meet enterprises where they are — for many that’s Bedrock,” Dresser wrote, referring to the AWS AI model platform. “Since we announced the partnership at the end of February, inbound demand from our customers for this offering has been frankly staggering.”

It’s a high-profile endorsement for AWS, the leading cloud platform by market share, and perhaps Amazon’s best answer yet to the persistent perception that it was caught flat-footed by the generative AI boom sparked by the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022.

The OpenAI-Amazon relationship has come full circle. As GeekWire previously reported, AWS was actually OpenAI’s first cloud partner, providing computing resources at the lab’s founding in 2015, before Microsoft swooped in.

A decade later, Amazon and OpenAI in February struck a $50 billion investment and a cloud deal worth more than $100 billion over eight years.

Microsoft’s deal with OpenAI remains intact. Azure is still the exclusive host for OpenAI’s core APIs, and Microsoft retains its intellectual property license and revenue-sharing arrangement, including a share of revenue from OpenAI’s partnerships with other cloud providers.

Dresser’s memo also took aim at Anthropic, whose Claude model has emerged as the popular favorite in enterprise applications and software development. She said Anthropic made a “strategic misstep to not acquire enough compute,” echoing a separate OpenAI memo to investors that characterized Anthropic as “operating on a meaningfully smaller curve.”

Amazon also has a major investment in Anthropic, having committed $8 billion to the Claude maker. Both Seattle-area tech giants now hold stakes in the two leading AI labs, showing how quickly the era of exclusive AI partnerships has given way to a messier set of alliances.