OpenAI today disclosed that ChatGPT has reached 900 million weekly active users, while simultaneously announcing a $110 billion funding round and a sweeping multi-year strategic partnership with Amazon that includes a $50 billion investment. The announcements, dated February 27, 2026, span infrastructure, cloud distribution, and custom model development, and together represent one of the most significant financial and technical commitments in the company's history.

The scale of ChatGPT's user base has grown sharply. In August 2025, the platform counted 700 million weekly active users. Today's figure of 900 million marks a substantial increase in just six months. More than 50 million of those users are paying consumer subscribers, according to OpenAI's disclosure. January and February 2026 are on track to be the two largest months for new subscriber additions in the company's history. Over 9 million paying business users rely on ChatGPT for work, while startups, enterprises, and governments are building on the OpenAI platform across engineering, support, finance, sales, and operations functions.

Codex and the developer base

OpenAI's coding tool Codex has attracted 1.6 million weekly active users, more than tripling since the beginning of 2026. The growth reflects a shift in how software is built: teams that once required dedicated engineering staff are increasingly using tools like Codex to automate development tasks. According to OpenAI's statement, weekly Codex users have grown more than threefold since January 2026.

The trajectory of Codex is notable for the marketing technology community, where software development underpins campaign tools, data pipelines, and measurement platforms. As AI-assisted coding becomes accessible to non-engineers, the barrier to building custom advertising tooling drops considerably.

The $110 billion funding round

OpenAI today announced $110 billion in new investment at a pre-money valuation of $730 billion. The round includes $30 billion from SoftBank, $30 billion from NVIDIA, and $50 billion from Amazon. Additional financial investors are expected to join as the round progresses, according to the company.

The $730 billion valuation is a significant marker. The valuation from this new round increases the value of the OpenAI Foundation's stake in OpenAI Group to over $180 billion, according to OpenAI's disclosure, strengthening what the company describes as one of the most well-resourced nonprofits in history. OpenAI states the funding will expand its capacity to support philanthropy in areas including health research and AI resilience.

The Amazon portion of the investment - $50 billion total - consists of an initial $15 billion commitment followed by a further $35 billion when certain conditions are met. The conditions were not specified in the announcement.

Amazon's role: cloud, distribution, and compute

The Amazon investment is embedded within a broader commercial partnership that restructures how OpenAI's technology reaches enterprise customers. Several distinct components make up the arrangement.

First, AWS and OpenAI are jointly developing a Stateful Runtime Environment powered by OpenAI models. This environment will be available through Amazon Bedrock, AWS's managed AI service, for customers building generative AI applications and agents at production scale. Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and AWS infrastructure services are integrated into the architecture, so that customer applications and agents run cohesively alongside existing infrastructure. The Stateful Runtime Environment is expected to launch within the next few months, according to OpenAI.

What distinguishes stateful environments from earlier approaches is their capacity to maintain context across sessions. A Stateful Runtime allows developers to keep context between interactions, remember prior work, operate across multiple software tools and data sources, and access compute on demand. The design addresses ongoing workflows and multi-step projects - tasks that prior generation model deployments handled poorly because each session began without memory of previous exchanges.

Second, AWS will become the exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider for OpenAI Frontier, the company's most advanced enterprise platform. Frontier enables organizations to build, deploy, and manage teams of AI agents that operate across real business systems. The platform includes shared context, built-in governance, and enterprise-grade security, and is designed so that organizations do not need to manage underlying infrastructure themselves.

The exclusivity arrangement for third-party cloud distribution means that enterprise customers seeking to access Frontier through a cloud provider other than OpenAI's own infrastructure will route through AWS. The practical significance for marketing technology buyers is that AWS-native stacks gain direct access to OpenAI's most advanced agent deployment infrastructure without requiring separate integration work.

Third, OpenAI will consume approximately 2 gigawatts of Trainium capacity through AWS infrastructure. This commitment spans both Trainium3 and the next-generation Trainium4 chips. Trainium4, expected to begin delivery in 2027, will provide higher FP4 compute performance, expanded memory bandwidth, and increased high-bandwidth memory capacity, according to OpenAI's disclosure. The total compute expansion grows OpenAI and AWS's existing $38 billion multi-year agreement by $100 billion over eight years.

The 2-gigawatt Trainium commitment is a precise technical figure. It represents not just storage or data transfer capacity, but dedicated AI training and inference compute, purpose-built silicon deployed specifically to support Stateful Runtime, Frontier, and other advanced workloads. The arrangement lowers the cost and improves the efficiency of producing intelligence at scale, according to OpenAI.

Custom models for Amazon's own applications

A fourth component of the partnership involves custom model development. OpenAI and Amazon will collaborate to build customized models available to Amazon developers for use in Amazon's customer-facing applications. Amazon teams will be able to tailor OpenAI models for use across AI products and agents that serve customers directly. These models will complement Amazon's existing Nova family, according to the announcement.

The Nova family has been a growing part of Amazon's developer infrastructure. Custom OpenAI models layered on top of that ecosystem give Amazon's internal teams another option for building and deploying AI-powered consumer experiences, from shopping recommendations to customer service.

NVIDIA's role in the broader funding picture

Beyond the Amazon deal, OpenAI is expanding its long-standing collaboration with NVIDIA. The arrangement includes the use of 3 gigawatts of dedicated inference capacity and 2 gigawatts of training on Vera Rubin systems, building on Hopper and Blackwell systems already in operation across Microsoft, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and CoreWeave. NVIDIA's $30 billion contribution to the funding round reflects both a financial stake and a deep infrastructure dependency.

For the advertising technology industry, the NVIDIA dimension matters because inference compute - the hardware that powers real-time AI responses - directly determines the speed, reliability, and cost of AI-powered experiences. As AI advertising platforms expand their automated campaign tools, the cost and latency of model inference shapes what is commercially viable to deploy at scale.

What this means for advertising and marketing

The intersection of OpenAI's user growth and the AWS partnership carries specific implications for the marketing community. ChatGPT's 9 million paying business users represent a substantial pool of professionals already using the platform for work. The Frontier platform, distributed exclusively through AWS for third-party cloud customers, now sits at the center of how enterprises deploy AI agents across business functions.

Marketing technology has been moving toward agentic AI throughout 2025 and into 2026. Amazon's advertising platform has progressively opened API access to AI agents, enabling platforms like ChatGPT to connect with campaign management functions through standardized protocols. The OpenAI-Amazon partnership creates structural alignment between the company behind ChatGPT and the cloud infrastructure that powers Amazon's advertising stack.

OpenAI's own advertising ambitions add another layer of context. ChatGPT began serving brand advertisements at approximately $60 CPM in early 2026, positioning the platform as a high-intent advertising surface. With 900 million weekly users and 50 million paying subscribers, the platform now operates at a scale that makes it a meaningful media channel in its own right.

Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, said in a statement: "OpenAI and Amazon share a belief that AI should show up in ways that are practical and genuinely useful for people. Combining OpenAI's intelligence with Amazon's infrastructure and global reach helps us put powerful AI into the hands of businesses and users at real scale."

Separately, Altman noted in the scaling announcement: "We're pushing the frontier across infrastructure, research, and products to make AI more capable, reliable, and broadly useful. SoftBank, NVIDIA, and Amazon are long-term partners who share our ambition to turn real scientific progress into systems that deliver meaningful benefits for people at global scale."

The financial architecture of the round

The structure of the $110 billion round is notable. SoftBank and NVIDIA each contribute $30 billion, and Amazon contributes $50 billion - the largest single investor commitment. The phased nature of the Amazon investment, with $15 billion upfront and $35 billion contingent on conditions being met, introduces execution-linked capital deployment rather than a straightforward equity transaction. Additional investors are expected to join, suggesting the round has not yet closed.

OpenAI's valuation has moved substantially in a short period. The $730 billion pre-money figure gives context to the scale of capital concentration forming around a small number of frontier AI companies. For advertisers and marketing technology professionals, that concentration shapes which platforms will have the infrastructure to serve AI-driven workflows reliably at global scale over the next several years.

Timeline

Summary

Who: OpenAI and Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), with additional investment from SoftBank and NVIDIA.

What: A multi-year strategic partnership encompassing a $50 billion Amazon investment in OpenAI, joint development of a Stateful Runtime Environment for AI agents on Amazon Bedrock, exclusive AWS third-party cloud distribution for OpenAI Frontier, a commitment to consume 2 gigawatts of Trainium compute through AWS, and custom model development for Amazon's customer-facing applications. The announcements also disclosed that ChatGPT has reached 900 million weekly active users, 50 million consumer subscribers, and 9 million paying business users, alongside a broader $110 billion funding round at a $730 billion pre-money valuation.

When: February 27, 2026.

Where: The announcement was published on OpenAI's website and encompasses infrastructure deployed across AWS global regions, with Trainium4 chip delivery expected from 2027.

Why: According to OpenAI, meeting demand for AI products requires compute, distribution, and capital - all three addressed by this round. The Amazon partnership specifically addresses cloud distribution at enterprise scale and lowers the cost of producing AI inference capacity. The investment from Amazon, NVIDIA, and SoftBank reflects each company's strategic interest in ensuring access to frontier AI infrastructure as demand from enterprises, developers, and consumers continues to grow.

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