Sam Altman’s blowtorch to his competitors is so hot, it even includes a new partnership with Amazon Web Services.
As OpenAI announced two open-weight reasoning models with capabilities on par with its o-series, Amazon announced that the new models would become available on AWS on Tuesday. This is the first time that OpenAI models will be offered by AWS, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. They will be available as a model choice with Amazon AI services Bedrock and SageMaker AI.
While anyone can download the models via Hugging Face, Amazon is offering these models with OpenAI’s full knowledge and approval, as Dmitry Pimenov, the model maker’s product lead, indicated in the announcement. A spokesperson described the offering as similar to how Amazon offered open model DeepSeek-R1 earlier this year.
This is a juicy competitive move for both companies. For AWS, it finally puts the cloud giant in the same sentence as the biggest model maker, OpenAI.
Until now, AWS has best been known as a major host and a financial backer of Anthropic’s Claude, one of OpenAI’s biggest competitors. AWS offers Claude, along with other models from makers such as Cohere, DeepSeek, Meta, and Mistral, as well as its own home-grown ones in its AI services. Specifically, Bedrock allows AWS customers to build and host generative AI apps using models of their choice. SageMaker, on the other hand, allows AWS customers to train, or even build, their own AI models largely for analytics uses.
While AWS’s ultimate rival, Microsoft, hasn’t had a lock on OpenAI models since January, Azure is still OpenAI’s most significant cloud partner to date. OpenAI even announced that Microsoft is offering versions of these two new models, too, optimized for Windows devices.
Watching Microsoft win an increasing amount of cloud business with OpenAI has been a public pain in Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s neck. Just last week during Amazon’s quarterly earnings call, Jassy was pounded with questions from Wall Street analysts about how the c …