Amazon joins the OpenAI money loop

Welcome to The Prompt, your Monday dive into the world of AI that puts Asia front and center. From Big Tech’s power players to the region’s scrappy disruptors, we cover it all. Want full access to all our AI reporting? Subscribe to us here.

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Hello reader,

Earlier this year, it was relatively easy to map the AI landscape, at least at the top end of the industry. OpenAI was a Microsoft tie-up, and Anthropic was the Amazon and Google-linked project.

But last Tuesday, lines were blurred further, as reports emerged that Amazon is in talks to invest at least US$10 billion in OpenAI. The deal would value the ChatGPT maker at a staggering US$500 billion.

To be fair, OpenAI previously signed a US$38 billion cloud deal with AWS, so it’s not the biggest shock. But the new investment could force OpenAI to use Amazon’s Trainium chips as part of the deal.

This could set the Jeff Bezos-founded company up as a bona fide competitor to Nvidia, which has dominated the hardware side of AI for quite some time with its 92% share in the data center GPU market.

As someone with an aging computer looking for a much-needed upgrade: yes, please, as competition would lead to lower GPU prices. (Though RAM is a different story, as my colleague Scott highlighted in a previous edition of The Prompt.)

The OpenAI-Amazon deal could also signal that there is an AI bubble waiting to pop, as investments continue to cycle between tech giants. In one of this edition’s featured stories, Scott looks into the current AI landscape and how it might fare in the coming year, answering questions like “Is there a bubble to begin with?”

This marks the last edition of The Prompt for 2025. But don’t worry, we’ll be back with more insightful, bite-sized reads on AI on January 12, 2026. See you then!

Miguel Cordon, journalist

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1️⃣ Who’s afraid of a big, bad AI bubble in 2026?

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