OpenAI has signed a deal to buy $38 billion worth of capacity from Amazon Web Services, its first contract with the leader in cloud infrastructure and the latest sign that the $500 billion artificial intelligence startup is no longer reliant on Microsoft.

Under the agreement announced on Monday, OpenAI will immediately begin running workloads on AWS infrastructure, tapping hundreds of thousands of Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) in the U.S., with plans to expand capacity in the coming years.

Amazon stock climbed about 5% following the news.

The first phase of the deal will use existing AWS data centers, and Amazon will eventually build out additional infrastructure for OpenAI.

“It’s completely separate capacity that we’re putting down,” said Dave Brown, vice president of compute and machine learning services at AWS, in an interview. “Some of that capacity is already available, and OpenAI is making use of that.”

OpenAI has been on a dealmaking spree of late, announcing roughly $1.4 trillion worth of buildout agreements with companies including Nvidia, Broadcom, Oracle and Google — prompting skeptics to warn of an AI bubble and question whether the country has the power and resources needed to turn the ambitious promises into reality.

Until this year, OpenAI had an exclusive cloud agreement with Microsoft, which first backed the company in 2019 and has invested a total of $13 billion. In January, Microsoft said it would no longer be the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI, and was moving to an arrangement where it would have right of first refusal for new requests.

Last week, Microsoft’s preferential status expired under its newly negotiated commercial terms with OpenAI, freeing the ChatGPT creator to partner more widely with the other hyperscalers. Even before that, OpenAI forged cloud deals with Oracle and Google, but AWS is by far the market leader.

“Scaling frontier AI requires massive, reliable compute,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in Monday’s release. “Our partnership with AWS strengthens the broad compute ecosystem that will power this next era and bring advanced AI to everyone.”

OpenAI will still be spending heavily with Microsoft, reaffirming that commitment by saying last week that it will purchase an incremental $250 billion of Azure services.

For Amazon, the pact is significant both in the size and scale of the deal itself and because the cloud giant has close ties to OpenAI rival Anthropic. Amazon has invested billions of dollars in Anthropic, and is currently constructing an $11 billion data center campus in New Carlisle, Indiana, that’s designed exclusively for Anthropic workloads.

“The breadth and immediate availability of optimized compute demonstrates why AWS is uniquely positioned to support OpenAI’s vast AI workloads,” AWS CEO Matt Garman said in the release.

In its earnings report last week, Amazon reported more than 20% year-over-year revenue growth at AWS, beating analyst estimates. But growth was faster at Microsoft and Google, which reported cloud expansion of 40% and 34%, respectively.

Companies including Peloton, Thomson Reuters, Comscore, and Triomics use OpenAI models on AWS for tasks ranging from coding and mathematical problem solving to scientific analysis and agentic workflows.

Monday’s announcement establishes a more direct relationship.

“As part of this deal, OpenAI is a customer of AWS,” Brown said. “They’ve committed to buying compute capacity from us, and we’re charging OpenAI for that capacity. It’s very, very straightforward.”

For OpenAI, the most highly valued private AI company, the AWS agreement is another step in getting ready to eventually go public. By diversifying its cloud partners and locking in long-term capacity across providers, OpenAI is signaling both independence and operational maturity.

Altman acknowledged in a recent livestream that an IPO is “the most likely path” given OpenAI’s capital needs. CFO Sarah Friar has echoed that sentiment, framing the recent corporate restructuring as a necessary step toward going public.

WATCH: AWS CEO Matt Garman on Amazon’s massive new AI data center for Anthropic

Database software maker MongoDB said on Monday that CEO Dev Ittycheria is stepping down from the top job after an 11-year run.

Chirantan “CJ” Desai, who has spent the past year as president of product and engineering at Cloudflare, is replacing Ittycheria, effective Nov. 10, MongoDB said. Ittycheria will remain on the company’s board.

“Earlier this year, I would say as part of our normal succession planning process, the board asked me about my long-term plans and whether I could commit for another five years as CEO,” Ittycheria told CNBC in an interview. “I thought long and hard about it, and I talked to my family, I talked to the board and ultimately realized I couldn’t make that kind of decision.”

Before joining MongoDB, Ittycheria was president of BMC, which bought his company BladeLogic for $854 million in 2008. As BladeLogic’s co-founder and CEO, Ittycheria took the company public in 2007. He’s also been an investor at venture firms OpenView and Greylock.

Ittycheria led MongoDB’s IPO in 2017, three years after taking the helm. The company won over individual software developers thanks to its database’s architecture that could store a variety of data in documents, challenging market incumbents like Oracle.

Under Ittycheria, the company prioritized cloud subscriptions, landed multi-year deals, partnered with rival cloud providers Amazon and Microsoft and expanded the software’s capabilities into generative artificial intelligence.

MongoDB’s stock closed on Friday at $359.82, representing a fifteenfold gain since the IPO and lifting the company’s market cap to almost $30 billion. MongoDB’s net loss in the July quarter narrowed to $47 million from $54.5 million a year earlier, while revenue rose 24% to $591 million.

Cloudflare said in a filing on Thursday that Desai would step down on Nov. 7, to become CEO “at another notable, publicly-traded company.” Desai previously served as operating chief at ServiceNow. He resigned in July 2024, after the software company found a policy violation with the hiring of the U.S. Army’s chief information officer. Previously Desai held leadership positions at EMC and Symantec.

“We talked to people close to ServiceNow, as well as other people who know CJ really well, and we felt very, very comfortable that CJ is the right person to lead MongoDB in this next era,” Ittycheria said.

Desai, whose first job out of college was at Oracle, said he will split his time between New York and the San Francisco area.

MongoDB also said it expects to exceed the high end of its guidance ranges for revenue and adjusted earnings per share in the fiscal third quarter. The top end of its range was 79 cents per share in earnings, and $592 million in revenue.

Desai said he’s “looking forward to grow MongoDB to $5 billion-plus in a durable, profitable way, in revenues, and most importantly, to be the gold standard for modern database technology, no matter what kind of workloads exist.” He did not offer a timeline for the revenue goal.

Executives will discuss the leadership change on a conference call with analysts at 10 a.m. ET.

WATCH: MongoDB CEO Dev Ittycheria on Q2 results: The opportunity in front of us is massive

Microsoft said Monday it has secured export licenses to ship Nvidia chips to the United Arab Emirates in a move that could accelerate the Gulf’s lofty AI ambitions.

The tech giant said it is the first company under U.S. President Donald Trump‘s administration to secure such licenses from the Commerce Department and that the approval, granted in September, was based on “updated and stringent technology safeguards.”

The licenses enable the firm to ship the equivalent of 60,400 additional A100 chips, involving tech darling Nvidia’s more advanced GB300 GPUs.

“While the chips are powerful and the numbers are large, more important is their positive impact across the UAE,” Microsoft said in a blog post. “We’re using these GPUs to provide access to advanced AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, open-source providers, and Microsoft itself.”

Nvidia shares climbed 3% Monday. Microsoft stock rose slightly.

Azad Zangana, head of GCC macroeconomic analysis at Oxford Economics, said in a note that Nvidia’s chips are “crucial” for the UAE’s push to be a major global player in AI.

“Access to the world’s leading AI chips provides the hardware that will give developers the leading edge that is needed in an incredibly competitive global landscape,” Zangana wrote.

There is a “very important” relationship between the UAE and U.S. governments that has spanned multiple administrations, Microsoft President Brad Smith told CNBC’s Dan Murphy at the ADIPEC conference in Abu Dhabi.

“We’re very grateful to the Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, and the work that he has championed to enable export licenses to be made available to us,” Smith said. “That builds as well on the relationships we had with Secretary [Marco] Rubio when he was in the Senate and Democrats as well. [It] takes two parties to govern, and we keep that in mind.”

Microsoft also announced it will be increasing its investment in UAE, bringing its total contribution to $15.2 billion by the end of this decade.

That includes a $1.5 billion equity investment in AI firm G42 and more than $5.5 billion in capital expenses for the expansion of Microsoft’s AI and cloud infrastructure projects in the region.

“We’re really investing in trust, and I think it’s that combination of technology, talent and trust that you’re seeing come together here in the UAE, around AI, around technology, but really the future of the whole economy,” Smith said.

— CNBC’s Dan Murphy contributed to this report.