The AWS partnership is OpenAI's first major cloud computing deal since it struck a new agreement with Microsoft, which gave it more flexibility.

“AWS is growing at a pace we haven’t seen since 2022, re-accelerating to 20.2% YoY,” Andy Jassy, the president and CEO of Amazon, said in the company’s earnings announcement. “We continue to see strong demand in AI and core infrastructure, and we’ve been focused on accelerating capacity — adding more than 3.8 gigawatts in the past 12 months.”

Experts say the incident revealed what can happen when a such a broad spectrum of companies rely on singular cloud provider.

Verizon announced a deal with Amazon Web Services on Monday to build high-capacity fiber routes connecting AWS data centers, aiming to strengthen infrastructure for the next generation of artificial intelligence applications.

Slack, Snapchat, Signal and Perplexity were some of the affected apps and websites, among a host of big names. AWS offers cloud servers that allow these services, and millions of other websites and platforms, to run. AWS is a cloud-computing platform that provides the infrastructure underpinning much of the internet.

Deal to span over 7 years, with OpenAI to immediately start using AWS infrastructure to run workloads, utilizing hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GPUs in the US, with plans to increase capacity over ne