Amazon has fully completed its investment in OpenAI: the cloud and commerce giant paid out the final tranche of 35 billion dollars at the end of July, according to an SEC filing dated July 31, 2026. In total, Amazon invested 50 billion dollars, giving it a calculated stake of approximately five percent in the San Francisco-based AI company.
Amazon pays final tranche ahead of contractual deadline
Amazon and OpenAI first announced the investment on February 27, 2026: Amazon was to provide 15 billion dollars immediately, with an additional 35 billion dollars to follow once OpenAI met certain unspecified conditions. Amazon has now paid out that second tranche in two steps – 13.7 billion dollars in the second quarter, with the remaining 21.3 billion dollars after June 30. According to the quarterly report filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Amazon put the money into Series C preferred shares of OpenAI.
The company does not account for the stake using the equity method, but rather as a so-called Level 3 fair-value measurement under “other income and expenses” – meaning any future swings in OpenAI’s valuation will directly hit Amazon’s quarterly results. Amazon did not disclose why it made the originally conditional final payment early; possible reasons include an already-met performance milestone or OpenAI’s confidential IPO filing submitted in June. Amazon is thus backing not only OpenAI but also its rival Anthropic – from that stake, the company reported a pre-tax valuation gain of 16.8 billion dollars in the first quarter of 2026.
AWS secures exclusive rights for Frontier agents
In exchange for the capital injection, OpenAI is expanding its infrastructure partnership with AWS. According to consistent reports, Amazon’s cloud division will become the exclusive external cloud provider for Frontier, a new platform through which companies are meant to build and manage their own AI agent teams for recurring workflows. The expanded contract is set to increase an existing 38 billion dollar agreement by up to 100 billion dollars over eight years; OpenAI reportedly commits to drawing on up to two gigawatts of computing capacity on Amazon’s own Trainium chips – roughly the continuous output of two large power plant units.
These figures come from press reports; neither Amazon nor OpenAI has officially confirmed the contract details. Amazon’s own AI business at AWS recently grew at a triple-digit rate: in the same quarterly filing, the company put the annualized revenue run rate for AI services at more than 25 billion dollars. How closely such capital injections are tied to Amazon’s own data center buildout is shown by Amazon’s rising investment needs: the company had raised its 2026 AI infrastructure budget to 220 billion dollars only days earlier.
Microsoft’s share remains far larger than Amazon’s
Amazon did not officially comment on the exact size of its new stake. Setting the investment amount against OpenAI’s 852 billion dollar valuation from the March 2026 funding round yields a calculated stake of around five percent – an estimate that is independently unverified. Microsoft, by its own account, still holds about 27 percent of OpenAI on a fully diluted basis and accounts for that stake under the equity method, meaning OpenAI’s profits and losses flow directly into Microsoft’s books.
A similar order of magnitude to Amazon’s stake also surfaced in a political proposal: OpenAI had likewise offered the US government roughly five percent of the company as a stake in a government fund vehicle. Investors read the early payment partly as a signal that OpenAI is closer to going public than previously assumed.
It remains unclear when OpenAI will actually go public: reports suggest CEO Sam Altman is aiming for a one trillion dollar valuation before taking that step, which could push a listing from late 2026 into 2027. For Amazon, the payoff of the bet hinges on whether its own cloud division can actually deliver on the fast-growing computing capacity it has promised OpenAI.
