Another major player has entered the quantum-computing race: Amazon.
The tech giant is the latest to make waves in the field with the February announcement of Ocelot, its own quantum chip. Amazon joins fierce competition from familiar rivals in cloud computing as Google, Microsoft and others race after what they say could be their next frontier.
While Amazon is widely known as an e-commerce giant, its business took a pivotal and profitable turn in 2006 with the launch of Amazon Web Services. AWS is now a more than $100 billion business and a key part of why Amazon is worth over $2 trillion. The company sees quantum as the next major growth area for its cloud services.
“There’s a … strong business case for AWS or Amazon to get involved with quantum computing,” Oskar Painter, director of quantum hardware for Amazon Web Services, told CNBC. “Quantum computing is very much in line with that sort of business model where you would have off-premise quantum computing resources that can be made accessible through the cloud.”
Part of the hype with quantum computing is the perceived payoff down the line. While still years away from commercial applications, McKinsey projects quantum could be a $173 billion market by 2040.
“The opportunity to build just a supercharged part of AWS that can crack incredibly difficult problems, whether it’s related to drug discovery or cybersecurity … that is an opportunity for them to charge a lot more,” said Gene Munster, managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management.
CNBC’s Kate Rooney got an exclusive look inside the AWS Center for Quantum Computing located at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. Founded in 2019, Amazon’s partnership with the university is starting to yield results, as it showcased the Ocelot quantum processor. Amazon says the chip, which it designed and fabricated in-house, uses a scalable architecture that reduces error correction by up to 90 percent. That’s a key obstacle in developing these machines. Google’s Willow chip, which was unveiled in December, also demonstrated improvements in this area.
Ocelot uses “cat qubits,” named after the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment. The company says the design intrinsically suppresses certain forms of errors, reducing the resources required for quantum error correction.
“The heart of these quantum computing systems … it’s really this quantum processor” Painter said. “The details of how that happens is really what differentiates one hardware platform from another – and really is where the secret sauce is and where all the intellectual property is.”
Munster said quantum-computing should be thought of as a new vertical within the AWS cloud business.
“In the end, it will probably be solved and monetized through one of these big cloud platforms,” Munster said. “And AWS has a great shot at being successful there.”
Watch the video as Kate Rooney goes behind-the-scenes at Amazon and learns how the company is taking on Google and Microsoft in the quantum computing race.
Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, attends the Viva Technology conference at the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 16, 2023.
Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters
Tesla posted a teaser video on X sparking speculation that the electric carmaker could be gearing up to release a new car.
The first video posted on Sunday shows a spinning component which many online said could be an internal component of a vehicle. The video ends with the numbers “10/7,” indicating Tuesday’s date.
A second video also posted on Sunday shows just the headlights of a car.
The teasers have sparked conversation online and among analysts about what Tesla is up to — and two theories have emerged.
The first is that it could be the next-generation Roadster vehicle that Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been promising for years.
The second is that Tesla could be about to unveil a long-awaited mass market model.
Musk teased the next-generation Roadster concept back at an event in November 2017, and in June 2018 in a series of tweets.
The billionaire has since hyped the vehicle repeatedly and, in September, said on X that “the new Roadster is something special beyond a car.”
Musk has a history of promising things that are either not delivered or take substantially longer than he initially says.
Meanwhile, Tesla has been saying a cheaper mass-market car will hit the market this year. However, Musk has confirmed this lower cost offering will effectively be a stripped down Model Y.
For investors, a mass-market model is seen as key to revitalizing Tesla’s sales. While Tesla reported a jump in auto deliveries in the third quarter of the year, this was attributed to a pull forward in demand due to the expiration of a federal tax credit. In the quarter before, Tesla reported a delivery decline.
The company has seen a continuous slump in sales in Europe, and it continues to face heavy competition in China, another key market, from local players like BYD which are also expanding overseas.
Chinese players have been launching low-cost offerings in Europe and elsewhere putting more pressure on Tesla to released a model at around the $25,000 to $30,000 mark.
AMD stock skyrocketed more than 30% on Monday following the news.
OpenAI will deploy 6 gigawatts of AMD’s Instinct graphics processing units over multiple years and across multiple generations of hardware, the companies said Monday. It will kick off with an initial 1-gigawatt rollout of chips in the second half of 2026.
“We have to do this,” OpenAI President Greg Brockman told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.” “This is so core to our mission if we really want to be able to scale to reach all of humanity, this is what we have to do.”
Brockman added that the company is already unable to launch many features in ChatGPT and other products that could generate revenue because of the lack of compute power.
As part of the tie-up, AMD has issued OpenAI a warrant for up to 160 million shares of AMD common stock, with vesting milestones tied to both deployment volume and AMD’s share price.
The first tranche vests with the first full gigawatt deployment, with additional tranches unlocking as OpenAI scales to 6 gigawatts and meets key technical and commercial milestones required for large-scale rollout.
If OpenAI exercises the full warrant, it could acquire approximately 10% ownership in AMD, based on the current number of shares outstanding.
The ChatGPT maker said the deal was worth billions, but declined to disclose a specific dollar amount.
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AMD one-day stock chart.
The deal positions AMD as a core strategic partner to OpenAI, marking one of the largest GPU deployment agreements in the artificial intelligence industry to date.
AMD CEO Lisa Su told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” that AI is on a 10-year growth path, and “at the end of the day, you need the foundational compute to do that.”
“You need partnerships like this that really bring the ecosystem together to ensure that, you know, we can really get the best technologies, you know, out there,” she said. “So we’re super excited about the opportunities here.”
The partnership could help ease industrywide pressure on supply chains and reduce OpenAI’s reliance on a single vendor.
OpenAI unveiled a landmark $100 billion equity-and-supply agreement with Nvidia nearly two weeks ago, cementing the chip giant’s role in powering the next generation of OpenAI models. That arrangement combined capital investment with long-term hardware supply — though in Nvidia’s case, it was the chipmaker taking an ownership stake in OpenAI.
Shares of Nvidia fell 1% on Monday following news of the OpenAI-AMD deal.
That deal accounts for a dedicated 10-gigawatt portion of OpenAI’s broader 23-gigawatt infrastructure road map. At an estimated $50 billion in construction costs per gigawatt — together with the AMD deal — OpenAI has committed roughly $1 trillion in new buildout spending in just the past two weeks.
OpenAI is also in talks with Broadcom to build custom chips for its next generation of models.
The arrangement between OpenAI and AMD adds a new layer to the increasingly circular nature of AI’s corporate economy, where capital, equity and compute are traded among the same handful of companies building and powering the technology.
Nvidia is supplying the capital to buy its chips. Oracle is helping build the sites. AMD and Broadcom are stepping in as suppliers. OpenAI is anchoring the demand.
It’s a tightly wound circular economy, and one that analysts fear could face real strain if any link in the chain starts to weaken.
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For AMD, the partnership is both a commercial milestone and a validation of its next-generation Instinct road map.
After years of trailing Nvidia in the AI accelerator market, AMD now has a flagship customer at the forefront of the generative AI boom.
Su said it creates “a true win-win enabling the world’s most ambitious AI buildout and advancing the entire AI ecosystem.”
It also reinforces OpenAI’s broader infrastructure ambitions.
Through its Stargate project, CEO Altman’s startup is rapidly transforming into one of the most aggressive infrastructure builders in the AI sector. Its first site in Abilene, Texas, is already operational and running Nvidia chips, with construction continuing to expand capacity.
Jason Kim, chief executive officer of Firefly Aerospace, center, during the company’s initial public offering at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, US, on Thursday, Aug. 7, 2025.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Firefly Aerospace stock climbed 9% Monday, after the space company said it’s buying defense technology contractor SciTec for $855 million as it looks to strengthen its national security offering.
The deal, announced Sunday, is slated to close at the end of the year and includes $300 million cash and $555 million in Firefly shares.
“These capabilities significantly enhance our ability to deliver integrated, software-defined solutions for critical national security imperatives, particularly Golden Dome,” said CEO Jason Kim in a release.
The company plans to integrate SciTec’s software into its tools. Capabilities such as missile warning, tracking and defense and autonomous command control will also support Firefly’s launch and space services, the company said.
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Last week, Firefly shares sank over 20% in one trading session after the company said a rocket exploded during a ground test at its Texas facility. That came shortly after the Federal Aviation Administration cleared Firefly in an investigation over another rocket failure.
Firefly shares debuted on the Nasdaq this summer to strong investor demand. The public listing marked the third significant space tech debut of 2025, and shares surged more than 30% on its first day of trading. The stock has since pulled back.
Firefly carries a growing list of key government and defense partners as it builds its position in the national security space. That includes a recent $177 million contract with NASA and a $50 million investment from Northrop Grumman.
Once the acquisition closes, Princeton, New Jersey-based SciTec will operate as a subsidiary run by current CEO Jim Lisowski.