Наталя Хандусенко Hot News 7 November 2025, 15:35

OpenAI may be planning to become a full-fledged cloud provider: what is known about it so far

It appears that Sam Altman has announced a potentially major new business direction for OpenAI.

"We're also looking at ways to sell computing power more directly to other companies (and people); we're pretty sure the world will need a lot of 'AI cloud', and we're excited to offer it," Altman wrote in X.

This suggests that OpenAI likely aims to become a full-fledged cloud provider. This would put the AI startup in direct competition with cloud giants like Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform, Business Insider writes .

Back in September, OpenAI CFO Sarah Fryar hinted at something similar. Speaking about future competition, she said that cloud providers are “learning at our expense” and she wants to make sure OpenAI doesn’t give away its AI know-how to these tech giants.

This comment also raises another important question: where will OpenAI get the money to pay for its recently signed AI infrastructure deals worth over $1 trillion.

One potential way would be to become a major cloud provider. These companies are unprecedented money-making machines on a scale. If a company is going to spend more than $1 trillion on AI chips, networking equipment, and massive data centers, one way to turn a profit relatively quickly is to rent out those computing resources to other companies.

That's why investors are less worried about Microsoft, Amazon, and Google right now. They already have huge cloud business models that generate returns on their infrastructure spending.

Without a cloud business, the future looks bleaker. Take Meta, for example. While the company also spends billions of dollars on data centers and hardware, it doesn't have a cloud service and therefore lacks a clear way to quickly recoup that significant investment. That's one reason Meta's stock has recently fallen.

OpenAI may be in a more difficult position than Meta right now. Building a serious cloud business could ease some of the investor concerns about the return on AI investments.

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