For seven years, getting OpenAI's models meant going through Microsoft. That changed Tuesday, when AWS customers gained access to OpenAI models and the Codex coding agent through Amazon Bedrock, the cloud service most big enterprises already use for AI work.
It's the first real proof that the wall between OpenAI and the rest of the cloud market is gone.
The new lineup goes live in the next few weeks through Amazon Bedrock. Until now, AWS only carried OpenAI's free, open-weight models, which were added back in August.
There's also a new service called Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents, powered by OpenAI. It lets companies build custom AI agents that remember past conversations, which has been a top ask from enterprise buyers trying to deploy AI in real work.
AWS CEO Matt Garman said at the launch event that customers had been pushing for this for a long time. Sam Altman sent a recorded message instead of showing up in person, since he was in court in Oakland for his case against Elon Musk.
On Monday, OpenAI and Microsoft reworked the deal that's defined AI infrastructure since before ChatGPT launched in 2022. OpenAI can now cap the revenue share it pays Microsoft and sell its services to enterprises on any cloud, which removed the soft exclusivity that had blocked deals like this one.
OpenAI revenue chief Denise Dresser told staff in a memo earlier this month that the Microsoft setup had limited the company's ability to meet enterprises "where they are - for many that's Bedrock." That language was unusually direct for a partner the company had been with for years.
Microsoft has supplied OpenAI's compute since before ChatGPT, and it's still the company's largest backer. Tuesday's AWS launch is the first piece of real evidence that the loosened arrangement is being used in the open market.
OpenAI committed $38 billion to AWS back in November, locking in compute capacity tied to specific Amazon hardware. Three months later, Amazon said it would invest $50 billion in OpenAI and supply two gigawatts of custom Trainium chips for training AI models.
The financial pipes between the two companies were already running deep before the models even arrived on Bedrock.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy called Tuesday's launch "very interesting" on X. Both companies have an obvious incentive to make the partnership work, as Amazon looks to close the AI gap on Microsoft and Google.
Microsoft is still OpenAI's largest backer, but every other cloud now has a real shot at OpenAI workloads. Oracle and CoreWeave have been pulling in OpenAI capacity contracts of their own.
The next 90 days will show which enterprise customers actually move workloads from Azure to Bedrock. The cloud wars just got their first real OpenAI front.
