OpenAI’s AWS turn shows how fast the Microsoft alliance is bending

GeekWire’s April 13 report suggests the next fight in AI is not model quality alone but distribution control. OpenAI chief revenue officer Denise Dresser wrote in an internal memo that demand from the company’s new Amazon Web Services relationship is already “frankly staggering,” a striking phrase because it turns AWS from infrastructure partner into evidence that OpenAI wants a wider enterprise route than Microsoft has provided. The story is here.

The most important line in the memo is not the jab at Anthropic. It is the admission that Microsoft has been “foundational to our success” but has also limited OpenAI’s ability to meet enterprises where they are. For many buyers, GeekWire reports, that place is Amazon Bedrock, which gives customers access to multiple model providers under one procurement and governance wrapper. That is a much different sales motion than asking large companies to reorganize around a single vendor’s stack.

The Amazon side of the equation is now large enough to change the balance of power. GeekWire says Amazon and OpenAI struck a $50 billion investment and a cloud deal worth more than $100 billion over eight years in February. If that structure holds, OpenAI gets more leverage in enterprise channels, Amazon gets a much stronger AI differentiator, and Microsoft loses some of the exclusivity that once defined the relationship. Yet the relationship has not snapped: Azure remains the exclusive host for OpenAI’s core APIs, and Microsoft keeps its intellectual property license and revenue-sharing arrangement.

The memo also shows how openly competitive the market has become. Dresser reportedly argued that Anthropic made a strategic mistake by not securing enough compute, while GeekWire notes that Amazon has also committed $8 billion to Anthropic. The bigger point is that the largest AI companies are no longer just training models. They are renegotiating where those models live, how they are sold, and who owns the customer relationship. If enterprise demand on AWS is arriving at the pace OpenAI claims, the old OpenAI-Microsoft compact may keep bending long before it formally breaks.