Amazon is reportedly in talks to invest $10 billion in OpenAI as carousel deals continue to become popular

Amazon is in early discussions to invest up to $10 billion in OpenAI in a deal that would see the AI ​​lab use the e-commerce giant’s AI chips, CNBC reported.

If the deal goes through, the deal would value OpenAI at more than $500 billion, Bloomberg reported, citing an anonymous source.

Amazon is looking to diversify its bets in the AI ​​race, which has so far seen it partner and invest $8 billion in Anthropic, a competitor to OpenAI. The e-commerce giant earlier this month also unveiled the latest version in its Trainium series of chips, and outlined the development of the next batch of those chips, complementing its cloud computing offerings via Amazon Web Services.

News of the deal comes two months after OpenAI completed its transition to a for-profit model, giving it more freedom to strike deals with investors other than Microsoft, one of the company’s early backers with a 27% stake.

Amazon’s investment in OpenAI would be the latest in a series of circular deals in the AI ​​space — with major hardware makers and cloud providers striking deals with young AI companies to use its products, while startups commit to using their own data centers and chips to train their own AI models.

Last March, OpenAI invested $350 million worth of equity in CoreWeave, which used the money to buy chips from its backer, Nvidia. These same chips provide compute for OpenAI, increasing CoreWeave’s revenue and ultimately making OpenAI’s share more valuable. Then in October, OpenAI signed a deal to take a 10% stake in AMD and committed to using the chipmaker’s AI-powered GPUs, and it also signed a chip usage agreement with Broadcom that month. In November, the maker of ChatGPT signed a $38 billion cloud computing deal with Amazon.

OpenAI and Amazon did not immediately respond to requests for comment.