‘AWS is being Switzerland as far as the frontier models they’re offering, and there are ways for partners to get compensated for doing that work and engaging,’ says Ethan Simmons, CEO of AWS partner PTP.
AWS and OpenAI are betting billions on each other with AWS partners bullish that the two tech giants’ collaboration strategy is a win for customers thanks to the booming popularity of OpenAI’s Codex and GPT models tied into AWS AI platforms like Bedrock.
“OpenAI on AWS is massive [because] AWS sees it as an opportunity to support customers and meet customers where they are,” said Justin Copie, CEO of West Henrietta, N.Y.-based AWS partner Innovative Solutions.
“They know not every customer is going to want to use Claude or any other specific AI model every time, so having OpenAI now at the table is an important part,” Copie said. “We look at models not as being, ‘Who’s the best?’ But we look at models as being, ‘Who’s the best for what application and what use case?’ Because OpenAI, quite frankly, is better at reasoning certain use cases versus Claude versus Llama.”
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AWS partners said that the company giving their customers easy access to all the popular frontier models, both from Amazon and third parties like OpenAI, takes the burden off themselves to do some of the heavy lifting—such as custom integration and building vendor relationships.
“AWS is being Switzerland as far as the frontier models they’re offering, and there are ways for partners to get compensated for doing that work and engaging,” said Ethan Simmons, CEO of Norwood, Mass.-based AWS life sciences partner specialist PTP.
Simmons said AWS is giving customers the ability to move seamlessly and frictionlessly between different frontier models providers like OpenAI to make partners’ life easier.
“I don’t have to go build five different relationships with these frontier model providers,” Simmons said. “It’s about flexibility. It’s really more about what the customers are asking for where they want to be able to jump between models based on the type of work that they’re doing.”
Simmons added, “When we’re helping our customers with their AWS environments, it’s definitely seen as an advantage of working with AWS versus some of the other hyperscalers.”
OpenAI And AWS’ $38 Billion Deal And New 2026 Collaboration
In late 2025, AWS and OpenAI formed a blockbuster deal for OpenAI to buy $38 billion worth of cloud capacity from AWS over the next seven years.
AWS CEO Matt Garman said with the $38 billion agreement, “OpenAI will immediately start using our world-class infrastructure—including Amazon EC2 UltraServers packed with hundreds of thousands of state-of-the-art Nvidia GPUs and the ability to scale to tens of millions of CPUs.”
The deal provided OpenAI with the computing power it needs for its popular ChatGPT and Codex products and to scale AI agents faster.
Then in April 2026, the companies unveiled OpenAI models directly on AWS, including Codex LLM on AWS, as well as Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents powered by OpenAI.
The move gave customers and AWS partners more ways to use OpenAI across application development, software engineering and agentic workflows.
Organizations can now power Codex with OpenAI models served directly from Amazon Bedrock. This allows any company with an AWS spending commitment and Bedrock access to frictionlessly start using OpenAI’s coding agent and products.
More than 4 million people now use Codex every week, according to OpenAI, to write code, explain systems, refactor applications, generate tests, modernize legacy codebases, and accelerate a broader set of professional workflows that extend beyond coding.
AWS Marketplace And Margin Opportunity
The AWS and OpenAI partnership provides some profitability and sales opportunities for partners via the AWS Marketplace.
“Through our AWS relationships, there’s been some opportunities for a partner to make some margin on using those models,” Simmons said.
“Also, there’s a lot of excitement in the market from a cloud marketplace standpoint of being able to partner with those frontier models through something like AWS Marketplace and be able to transact that way,” he said. “I think you’ll see more marketplace-type transactions that leverage those OpenAI models on the AWS Marketplace.”
AWS And Partners’ Model-Agnostic Approach
Partnersd said AWS having such a tight technology collaboration with OpenAI makes their life easier and helps generate some extra sales. However, they are just as bullish about AWS being open in terms of being able to offer customers multiple different models.
For example, customers can use models from Anthropic and Mistral AI on top of Bedrock.
“We are model-agnostic. We always have been. We use whatever AI a customer gives us to help solve their business need,” said Innovative CEO Copie.
AWS’ strategy of being AI-model-agnostic while having unique partnerships with leaders like OpenAI is the correct strategy, partners agreed.
“Our customers want cost-efficient solutions. They don’t want us just deploying one model for one model’s sake,” said Copie. “AWS is giving us the ability to move frictionlessly between both [Amazon’s] models and other different models.”
AWS generated $37.6 billion in total sales during the first quarter of 2026, representing an increase of 28 percent year over year.
The Seattle-based cloud giant currently has a $150 billion run rate.
