- OpenAI is now free to offer its products through other clouds - and AWS wasted no time taking advantage
- A handful of new offerings from AWS are aimed squarely at the enterprise
- But AWS isn't pinning its hopes solely on AWS
Microsoft and OpenAI are no longer exclusive. It’s not a breakup, per se, but a conscious uncoupling of sorts. And that has left plenty of room for AWS to swoop in as OpenAI’s rebound.
On Tuesday – just a day after Microsoft and OpenAI announced the end of their exclusivity agreement – AWS trotted out OpenAI execs onstage during an event about agentic AI called “What’s Next with AWS” and announced OpenAI’s frontier models would immediately be available in Amazon Bedrock. AWS CEO Matt Garman said that includes ChatGPT 5.4, with 5.5 to be added in the coming weeks.
“Customers have asked us ‘how can we get OpenAI models inside of AWS?’ That’s really what they want,” Garman said. “We’ve forced them for the last couple of years to have to – to get the great OpenAI models – to go to other places, and they didn’t like that. Now I think we don’t force people to have to make that choice.”
For nearly a year, speculation has run rampant that Microsoft and OpenAI might scrap a contract that gave Microsoft exclusive rights to OpenAI models and products in return for a hefty investment in the company. The rumors turned out to be true – the pair on Monday announced they signed a new deal giving Microsoft rights to ship OpenAI products first but allowing OpenAI to offer its products to customers using any cloud provider.
There are a couple other elements to the new contract – Microsoft will continue to non-exclusively license OpenAI for models and products through 2032 and will no longer pay OpenAI a revenue share – but the ability to spread its wings and fly across clouds is the biggie.
AWS had already been lurking in the wings, having struck a $50 billion strategic partnership deal with OpenAI at the end of February.
It seems AWS and OpenAI have been busy over the past eight weeks given the pair announced the launch of Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents built on OpenAI’s technology. The offering is the realization of the “Stateful Runtime Environment” the pair promised to create in their February announcement.
Anthony Liguori AWS VP and distinguished engineer, said the new tool integrates OpenAI’s “harness” – its runtime, environment and inference API – and allows it to run natively in AWS. “Models can generally figure out how to use tools in lots of different scenarios,” he explained. “By training the model with the harness, you ensure that you’re going to execute in the best way the model can.”
Enterprise angle
As Flexera has noted in its 2025 State of the Cloud report, Microsoft Azure has historically held a lead among large enterprises using the cloud while SMBs have favored AWS. But there’s no question that AWS wants to expand its presence in the enterprise.
During the “What’s Next with AWS” event, the company unveiled a desktop app for its Amazon Quick AI assistant, which in a nutshell is Amazon’s version of Microsoft Copilot. Jigar Thakkar, AWS’ VP Agentic AI for Business, noted that Amazon Quick connects to a worker’s email, Slack, CRM, calendar and local files to connect “the dots between people, projects, decisions and actions.”
New Street Research’s Dan Salmon argued in a note to investors that AWS is poised among cloud providers to benefit most from the Microsoft/OpenAI breakup primarily because OpenAI is so compute hungry. The open question, though, is “whether the change can help catalyze broader enterprise demand at AWS, e.g. expanding work with current multi-tenant AWS customers that tapped OpenAI models via Azure previously.”
But OpenAI isn’t the only avenue for AWS to expand its enterprise prowess. The company also recently inked an expanded partnership deal with Anthropic. At the time, Salmon said increased access to Claude on AWS could help drive more demand from enterprises.
“We think the newly expanded offering could help drive more profitable revenue from enterprises and other AI startups leveraging the newly expanded services,” he wrote.
Inertia, though, is a heck of a thing. And the question now is whether AWS can overcome the massive incumbent advantage Microsoft has with its embedded Office Suite as a distribution avenue for Copilot. Only time will tell.