Amazon’s $50 Billion OpenAI Investment Could Hinge on AGI

As The Information reported Wednesday (Feb. 25), sources in contact with OpenAI executives say the decision to invest could depend on whether the artificial intelligence (AI) startup goes public, or if it achieves “artificial general intelligence (AGI),” a term for AI that functions at the same level as humans.

Previous report have said OpenAI is targeting the fourth quarter of 2026 for its initial public offering (IPO).

While the investment is still being negotiated, the terms say Amazon would invest an initial $15 billion in OpenAI, with the remainder turning on whether the company reached AI or listed, the sources said. PYMNTS has contacted both Amazon and OpenAI for comment but has not yet received replies.

Amazon’s proposed investment is part of OpenAI’s current round of funding, which could exceed $100 billion and value the company at $730 billion before the financing.

Softbank and Nvidia are also planning to each invest $30 billion in three installments, the sources said. While past reports had Microsoft planning to invest “low billions” of dollars, the report added, sources said the company could invest even less, or not contribute at all.

Microsoft had for years been OpenAI’s biggest patron, investing roughly $13 billion into the startup in exchange for a 20% share in its revenue and the right to resell OpenAI’s models, the Information noted.

But as OpenAI began spending more on compute costs, it struck deals with companies for additional cloud services, Amazon included, while also raising increasingly large amounts of money. The company has forecast a need for $665 billion over the next five years to cover its compute costs, the report added.

In other AI news, PYMNTS spoke Thursday (Feb. 26) with Mladen Vladic, head of product, payment networks at FIS, about the way that agentic AI is shifting the balance of innovation in the payments world.

It’s a model in which software agents act on behalf of shoppers to seek out products, evaluate choices, negotiate terms and carry out transactions within predefined parameters.

“We are seeing something different with agentic commerce where you have the largest brands in the marketplace announcing first,” Vladic told PYMNTS during a conversation for the February edition of the What’s Next in Payments series, “Word of the Year.”

His word of choice was “agentic commerce.”

Unlike earlier disruptions, agentic acceleration is coming from the retail universe’s center of gravity, with companies like Walmart and Target launching collaborations with Google and OpenAI, that report said.

“This is a transformational inflection point in the industry,” Vladic said. “Not only in this country, but globally.”

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