OpenAI models hit AWS for the first time. Amazon announced that two new OpenAI open-weight reasoning models will be available on its cloud platform Tuesday. These models join Amazon AI services Bedrock and SageMaker as official model options.
Anyone can already download these models via Hugging Face. But AWS’s deal comes with OpenAI’s sign-off, according to Dmitry Pimenov, the model maker’s product lead. It’s similar to how Amazon offered the open-source DeepSeek-R1 model earlier this year.
This moves AWS into direct competition with Microsoft, OpenAI’s biggest cloud partner so far. Microsoft rolled out the same models optimized for Windows devices. Until now, AWS has mostly hosted Anthropic’s Claude and models from Cohere, Meta, and others. 
AWS CEO Andy Jassy faces pressure over losing AI ground to Microsoft. On last week’s earnings call, analysts grilled him on “significantly faster cloud growth” from Microsoft and Google, and concerns AWS is “falling behind in GenAI.” Jassy fired back:
“I think the second player is about 65% of the size of the AWS.”
Oracle also recently signed a $30 billion yearly deal with OpenAI for data center services, dwarfing AWS’s OpenAI ties.
OpenAI stands to benefit by diversifying cloud partners amid tense, renegotiated ties with Microsoft. AWS’s large customer base can now easily test OpenAI’s models inside AWS-hosted AI apps.
This deal also undercuts Meta, which recently admitted it may not open source future “superintelligence” models. OpenAI released these two new models under the Apache 2.0 open source license.
Amazon’s move adds a new chapter to cloud AI rivalry and reshuffles power between OpenAI’s top partners.
