In 2025, OpenAI has orchestrated one of the most aggressive expansion strategies in tech history, signing partnerships worth hundreds of billions of dollars with virtually every major player in the AI infrastructure ecosystem. From chip manufacturers to cloud providers, the San Francisco-based AI company has woven itself into the fabric of the technology industry through a series of landmark deals that collectively represent one of the largest capital deployments in corporate history.
Stargate: The $500 Billion Megaproject
Deal Amount: $500 billion over four years
Announced in January 2025 at a White House event, Stargate represents the crown jewel of OpenAI’s infrastructure ambitions. This massive AI infrastructure project is designed to build world-scale data centers across the United States specifically for AI computing. Operating under OpenAI’s direction, the project is funded by a powerful consortium led by SoftBank, Oracle, and Abu Dhabi’s MGX sovereign wealth fund. With $100 billion committed immediately and a total investment trajectory reaching $500 billion over four years, Stargate aims to create the physical backbone necessary for the next generation of artificial intelligence development. The scale of this undertaking is unprecedented in the tech industry, establishing OpenAI as the operator of what will become the largest AI-specific computing infrastructure in the world.
Nvidia: The $100 Billion GPU Partnership
Deal Amount: Up to $100 billion
In September 2025, OpenAI announced a groundbreaking partnership with Nvidia that fundamentally restructures how AI companies access computing power. For the first time, Nvidia will invest directly in OpenAI and supply data center chips without traditional cloud intermediaries. This deal focuses on providing Nvidia’s most advanced GPUs and computing infrastructure essential for OpenAI’s rapid model development and scaling efforts. The partnership includes the creation of up to 10 gigawatts of compute capacity, representing an extraordinary concentration of AI processing power. This direct relationship with the world’s leading AI chip manufacturer gives OpenAI preferential access to cutting-edge hardware and positions the company at the forefront of the AI arms race.
AMD: The $100 Billion Alternative Chip Strategy
Deal Amount: $100 billion
Announced in early October 2025, OpenAI’s partnership with AMD demonstrates a strategic diversification away from sole reliance on Nvidia. Under this long-term agreement, AMD will supply artificial intelligence chips that will power OpenAI’s data centers, with OpenAI securing options to acquire up to 10% of AMD contingent on meeting deployment milestones. This deal positions AMD as a core component provider for OpenAI’s AI infrastructure and represents AMD’s most significant validation as a legitimate competitor to Nvidia in the AI accelerator market. By backing both GPU manufacturers simultaneously, OpenAI ensures supply chain resilience while potentially driving competitive pricing and innovation between the two chipmaking giants.
Amazon Web Services: The $38 Billion Cloud Expansion
Deal Amount: $38 billion over seven years
In November 2025, OpenAI signed a transformative seven-year agreement with Amazon to secure vast cloud computing resources through AWS. This partnership provides OpenAI access to hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GPUs housed in Amazon’s global data centers, enabling the company to scale model training and deploy new AI agentic systems. The deal marks a major strategic shift for OpenAI, ending its exclusive dependence on Microsoft Azure for cloud compute and establishing AWS as a critical infrastructure partner. With Amazon’s unmatched global data center footprint and expertise in large-scale cloud operations, OpenAI gains the geographic diversity and redundancy necessary for deploying AI services worldwide.
Intel: The $25 Billion CPU Foundation
Deal Amount: $25 billion
Announced in October 2025, Intel’s partnership with OpenAI focuses on supplying x86 CPUs that will complement the GPU deployments from Nvidia and AMD in OpenAI’s data centers. The collaboration aims to build advanced AI server architectures and includes joint work with Nvidia on custom system-on-chips (SOCs) designed for specialized AI workloads. This deal recognizes that modern AI infrastructure requires more than just accelerators—it needs powerful general-purpose processors to orchestrate workflows, manage data pipelines, and handle the myriad tasks that support AI model training and inference. By partnering with Intel, OpenAI is future-proofing its compute stack with a balanced architecture that can adapt to evolving technical requirements.
TSMC: The $20 Billion Fabrication Partnership
Deal Amount: $20 billion
As the primary manufacturer of chips for both Nvidia and AMD, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company announced its OpenAI partnership in October 2025. While TSMC doesn’t sell directly to OpenAI, the company benefits substantially from OpenAI’s massive chip orders placed through Nvidia and AMD. OpenAI’s expanding hardware requirements drive demand for TSMC’s most advanced fabrication processes and cutting-edge packaging technologies across multiple chip generations. This relationship ensures OpenAI has visibility into the semiconductor supply chain and secures priority manufacturing capacity for the custom silicon powering frontier AI models. In an era of chip shortages and geopolitical manufacturing tensions, this connection to the world’s most advanced semiconductor foundry provides crucial supply chain security.
Microsoft: The $13 Billion Annual Cloud Commitment
Deal Amount: $13 billion annually
Microsoft, OpenAI’s original exclusive cloud provider and largest investor, formalized an updated partnership in October and November 2025 following OpenAI’s corporate restructuring. Under this arrangement, OpenAI continues to pay Microsoft for substantial Azure data center capacity while granting Microsoft rights to OpenAI’s technologies and certain models. Microsoft maintains approximately a $135 billion stake in OpenAI, reflecting years of investment and deep integration between the companies. The current cloud contract is valued at $13 billion per year as part of larger multi-year commitments totaling hundreds of billions of dollars. Despite OpenAI’s diversification to other cloud providers, Microsoft remains a foundational infrastructure partner with unparalleled access to OpenAI’s technological developments.
Oracle: The $10 Billion Stargate Infrastructure
Deal Amount: $10 billion annually (reported at $30 billion per year for five years)
In July 2025, Oracle signed a major agreement to provide OpenAI with data center services as part of the Stargate project, delivering 4.5 gigawatts of computing capacity. Oracle’s cloud infrastructure is pivotal for supporting OpenAI’s rapid scaling requirements and the construction of massive new data center campuses across the United States. This partnership leverages Oracle’s expertise in building hyperscale facilities and managing enterprise-grade infrastructure at unprecedented scale. For Oracle, the deal represents validation of its cloud ambitions and positions the company as a key player in the AI infrastructure landscape alongside AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
Broadcom: The $10 Billion Custom Chip Initiative
Deal Amount: $10 billion
Announced in October 2025, OpenAI’s partnership with Broadcom marks the company’s first major in-house chip design initiative. The collaboration involves co-developing 10 gigawatts of custom AI accelerators along with associated systems and networking infrastructure. These custom chips, expected to roll out between 2026 and 2029, will be deployed in OpenAI’s own data centers and partner facilities. By designing proprietary silicon tailored specifically to its models and workloads, OpenAI follows in the footsteps of Google, Amazon, and Meta, all of which have developed custom AI chips to optimize performance and reduce dependence on merchant silicon providers. This strategic move toward vertical integration could provide OpenAI with long-term competitive advantages in both performance and cost efficiency.
OpenAI’s “Too Big to Fail” Strategy
Through this extraordinary series of partnerships, OpenAI has effectively made itself too big to fail in the technology ecosystem. The company has enmeshed itself so deeply with virtually every major technology provider—from chip manufacturers to cloud platforms to semiconductor foundries—that its success has become intertwined with the fortunes of the entire AI infrastructure industry.
This represents a brilliant strategic maneuver. By distributing hundreds of billions of dollars in commitments across the technology sector, OpenAI has created a powerful web of well-funded partners who have vested interests in the company’s continued growth and success. Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, Broadcom, and TSMC now count OpenAI among their largest customers, making the AI company’s prosperity directly tied to their quarterly earnings and long-term strategic planning.
The scale of these commitments means that OpenAI’s partners have strong incentives to ensure the company thrives. These technology giants will likely provide preferential pricing, priority access to scarce resources, technical support, and strategic guidance to protect their massive revenue streams from OpenAI. This creates a formidable competitive moat that will be difficult for rivals to replicate.
This positioning will serve OpenAI well as it faces intensifying competition from multiple directions. Established tech giants like Google, with its DeepMind division and Gemini models, possess vast resources and integrated ecosystems. Meanwhile, well-funded startups like Anthropic—ironically founded by former OpenAI employees—are attracting significant investment and technical talent. OpenAI’s strategy of becoming indispensable to the broader technology industry provides a buffer against these competitive threats that pure technical excellence alone could not guarantee.
The mastermind behind this dealmaking blitz is CEO Sam Altman, whose background as President of Y Combinator—Silicon Valley’s most influential startup accelerator—prepared him perfectly for this moment. During his tenure at YC, Altman became one of the technology industry’s most accomplished networkers and dealmakers, developing relationships with investors, founders, and executives across the sector. His ability to articulate grand visions while negotiating complex partnerships has proven invaluable in securing the unprecedented commitments that OpenAI announced throughout 2025.
Altman’s approach demonstrates a sophisticated understanding that in the AI era, technological capability alone is insufficient for market leadership. Success requires securing access to scarce computational resources, building redundant supply chains, and creating strategic dependencies that align powerful partners’ incentives with the company’s trajectory. By making OpenAI simultaneously the largest customer and strategic partner to virtually the entire AI infrastructure ecosystem, Altman has engineered a position of strength that extends far beyond the company’s models and research capabilities.
In the coming years, as artificial intelligence competition intensifies and computational requirements continue to expand exponentially, OpenAI’s web of strategic partnerships will likely prove decisive. The company has transformed itself from a research lab dependent on single partners into a central node in the global technology infrastructure, with hundreds of billions of dollars in commitments ensuring it will have the resources needed to compete at the frontier of AI development. Whether this strategy ultimately succeeds in maintaining OpenAI’s position atop the AI industry remains to be seen, but the company has undeniably positioned itself with every possible structural advantage.