Amazon and Nvidia open their wallets to lock in OpenAI's business while SoftBank keeps the lights on

The headlines say OpenAI on Friday announced $110 billion in new investment from Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank at a $730 billion pre-money valuation, though terms and conditions apply.

Both Amazon's $50 billion and Nvidia's $30 billion investments are tied to massive customer commitments by OpenAI and its partners. 

Of Amazon's investment, $35 billion will only be paid out "when certain conditions are met." From what we gather, those conditions include renting out two gigawatts worth of Amazon's Trainium AI accelerators and the deployment of OpenAI models and services in AWS. The cloud provider will also be the "exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider for OpenAI Frontier."

Announced earlier this month, Frontier is OpenAI's new agent builder aimed at enterprise customers. Curiously, OpenAI was quick to emphasize that "nothing about today's announcements in any way changes the terms of the Microsoft and OpenAI relationship," and that ...