A listed company can buy a piece of a private one, and its shareholders see almost nothing change. The shares have no market price, so the holding sits in the accounts at what was paid for it. It stays there until a later funding round or a listing puts a new price on it. In the meantime the private company may also be a customer, so money that left as an investment can come back as revenue.
The paper trail is thin but precise. The agreement itself is described in a current report filed on the day it is signed. The cash paid, and the balance-sheet line it sits in, appear in each quarterly report afterward. What the company expects the customer side to be worth shows up in results releases and the annual letter to shareholders.
Amazon bought into OpenAI this way in 2026: the stake was announced in one sentence, paid in three parts across five months, and arrived with a cloud contract several times its size. Each of those parts is written down in a filing, with a date and a figure.
On BloFin the share that carries the stake is held as the AMZNX/USDT Spot token or as the AMZNUSDT Perpetual, and the stake reaches either only through the Amazon share price.
What is Amazon's OpenAI stake?
Amazon's OpenAI stake is $50 billion of Series C Preferred Stock in OpenAI Group PBC, bought during 2026 (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). Preferred stock is a class of shares sold in a private company's funding round that ranks ahead of the founders' and employees' common stock. Amazon paid $15 billion in the first quarter and $13.7 billion in the second, and the last $21.3 billion followed after June 30, 2026, before the second-quarter report was filed on July 31 (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q).
Say you read the current report Amazon filed on February 27, 2026. It describes two agreements. In the first, Amazon's subsidiary agreed to buy $15 billion of preferred stock in the funding round OpenAI was then running, with the purchase due on March 31, 2026. In the second, a letter agreement, the subsidiary committed to a further $35 billion (source: Amazon Form 8-K, February 27, 2026). Amazon could buy those shares whenever it chose, and it had to buy them on the earlier of two events: OpenAI meeting milestones the filing keeps confidential, or OpenAI listing its shares in the United States. Had the $35 billion still been unpaid on December 31, 2028, the letter would have lapsed (source: Amazon Form 8-K, February 27, 2026).
The public version was one sentence. The joint announcement said Amazon would invest $50 billion, "starting with an initial $15 billion investment and followed by another $35 billion in the coming months when certain conditions are met" (source: Amazon and OpenAI joint release, February 27, 2026). Amazon paid the whole amount well before the 2028 date. The filings record the payments and say nothing about which trigger, if any, brought them forward. By the end of June Amazon had paid $28.7 billion, and the filing records the remaining $21.3 billion as paid after the quarter closed (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). The shares are held by Amazon.com NV Investment Holdings LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary (source: Amazon Form 8-K, February 27, 2026).
Preferred stock in a private company comes with no ticker, so the stake reaches a shareholder only through Amazon itself. Amazon has one class of listed stock, and each share carries the OpenAI holding in the same proportion as every other Amazon asset, which is the structure what Amazon stock is describes. The same is true of AWS, the unit that sells OpenAI its computing, and can you buy AWS stock sizes how much of Amazon that unit is.
How the $50 billion was paid and where it sits on Amazon's balance sheet
Amazon paid for the stake in cash and carries it at cost, inside other assets, in a line the filings call equity investments in private companies. The first-quarter report said the company expected to fund the investment from cash on hand, and the same report showed $59.5 billion of new debt raised (source: Amazon Q1 2026 Form 10-Q).
Say you open the June 2026 balance sheet looking for OpenAI. There is no line with that name. The holding sits inside equity investments in private companies, a line that stood at $16.2 billion on December 31, 2025, $48.1 billion on March 31, 2026 and $122.3 billion on June 30, 2026 (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). Of the June figure, $92.5 billion was Anthropic preferred stock and $28.7 billion was OpenAI, which leaves about $1.1 billion for everything else (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). The OpenAI figure equals what had been paid. The rule for the line is to hold the shares at cost and adjust them only for observable price changes or impairments (source: Amazon Q1 2026 Form 10-Q). Any adjustment is booked in other income as a Level 3 fair value measurement, the accounting label for a value estimated without a market price.
That rule decides when the stake can touch Amazon's profit. Anthropic's funding rounds in the first half of 2026 were observable price changes and were booked through other income (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). The OpenAI shares carried no adjustment in the same period, because the price Amazon paid was the price of the round it joined. Amazon's total holdings of equity, warrants and convertible notes in other companies reached $229.7 billion on June 30, 2026, from $96.5 billion three months earlier. The two labs make up $219.1 billion of the June figure: Anthropic notes $97.9 billion, Anthropic preferred stock $92.5 billion and OpenAI $28.7 billion (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q).
The cash going out is larger than the stake. Amazon's payments for acquisitions and investments were $39.8 billion in the first half of 2026, of which OpenAI was $28.7 billion. Over the same six months it spent $96.3 billion on property and equipment and raised $82.4 billion of new debt (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). Amazon's AI capex and cash flow follows that borrowing and spending through to free cash flow.
The cloud contract that came with it: $38 billion, then $100 billion more
The investment arrived alongside a customer contract, and the contract is the larger number. In November 2025 AWS and OpenAI announced a $38 billion agreement for OpenAI to run its workloads on AWS computers, with the capacity due before the end of 2026 and growth over seven years (source: Amazon, November 3, 2025).
On February 27, 2026, the day of the investment, the two companies expanded that agreement by $100 billion over eight years (source: Amazon and OpenAI joint release, February 27, 2026). The four agreements between the two companies sit side by side in the filings, two of them Amazon's money and two of them OpenAI's.
Agreement | Date | Amount | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
Series C preferred stock | February 27, 2026; paid March to July 2026 | $50 billion | Amazon's investment in OpenAI, carried at cost |
Letter agreement | February 27, 2026 | $35 billion of the $50 billion | Amazon's commitment to buy the rest, triggered by milestones or a US listing, lapsing December 31, 2028 |
Cloud agreement | November 3, 2025 | $38 billion | OpenAI's commitment to buy AWS computing over seven years |
Expansion | February 27, 2026 | $100 billion over 8 years | OpenAI's additional commitment, including about 2 gigawatts of Trainium capacity |
The investment and the letter agreement are Amazon's cash going out for shares. The cloud agreement and its expansion are OpenAI's promise to spend on AWS, which reaches Amazon as revenue only as the computing is delivered and used (source: Amazon Q1 2026 Form 10-Q). The expansion includes obligations tied to the performance of AWS chips, which means part of the $100 billion depends on Amazon's own Trainium processors doing what the contract requires (source: Amazon Q1 2026 Form 10-Q).
Three product terms sit inside the same announcement. AWS became "the exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider for OpenAI Frontier", the platform OpenAI sells for running teams of AI agents, so other clouds can carry OpenAI's models but only AWS distributes that product. OpenAI committed to about 2 gigawatts of Trainium capacity across the current Trainium3 chips and the Trainium4 chips due from 2027. The two companies also agreed to build customized OpenAI models for Amazon's own customer-facing applications, beside Amazon's Nova models (source: Amazon and OpenAI joint release, February 27, 2026). The Trainium commitment starts ramping in 2027, so the chip revenue belongs to 2027 and later (source: Amazon Q1 2026 results release). Why Amazon builds its own AI chips explains what a gigawatt of Trainium is and why both labs chose it.
How the stake can reach the Amazon share price
The stake and the contract can move four lines of Amazon's accounts, each for a different reason and on a different clock. The contract shows up first in the AWS backlog, then in AWS revenue as computing is delivered. The shares show up in other income only when a transaction reprices them, and become tradable stock only if OpenAI lists.
The backlog is where the contract appears first. AWS reports the commitments in customer contracts that it expects to fulfill but has yet to book as revenue. That figure was about $244 billion at the end of 2025 (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K). It reached about $364 billion at the end of March 2026 and about $496 billion at the end of June, while the weighted-average remaining life of the contracts lengthened from 5.5 to 6.4 years (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). The filings name the $100 billion OpenAI expansion and a later Anthropic expansion of more than $100 billion in the two paragraphs that follow the backlog figure, without saying how much of either is inside it. A backlog dollar becomes a revenue dollar only when the customer uses the computing, and the filing says the timing depends on customer usage (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q).
The shares reach profit through other income, and only on an event: a new funding round that sets an observable price for the stock. That is what happened with Anthropic in the first half of 2026: $62.8 billion of write-ups made other income $69.1 billion for the six months and lifted net income far past operating income (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). A future OpenAI round priced higher than the Series C round would do the same for the OpenAI shares, and a round priced lower would do the opposite. How Amazon stock is valued shows what such a gain does to the trailing P/E, since it is real income that never passed through the business.
A listing is the route that would give the shares a price of their own. If OpenAI completes an IPO or another liquidity event, the Series C shares convert to common stock, after which Amazon expects a customary lock-up before it could sell (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). Any part of the $35 billion still unpaid at a listing would have converted into the listed class at the same effective price per share as the Series C round (source: Amazon Form 8-K, February 27, 2026). That clause was spent once the whole amount was paid in July 2026. What the OpenAI IPO is covers the listing itself.
The four routes side by side:
Route | Line of Amazon's accounts | What has moved so far |
|---|---|---|
Contracted spending | AWS backlog (commitments not yet recognized as revenue) | $244 billion at December 31, 2025; $364 billion at March 31, 2026; $496 billion at June 30, 2026 |
Delivered computing | AWS net sales and operating income | Trainium capacity ramps from 2027; GPU capacity targeted for deployment through 2026 |
Repricing of the shares | Other income (expense), net; Level 3 | None for OpenAI through June 30, 2026; $62.8 billion for Anthropic in the same half |
Listing | Conversion of preferred to common; lock-up | No listing; the remaining commitment would have converted to the listed class at the same price |
Each route ends in the Amazon share price, which the AMZNX/USDT Spot pair tracks, and the pair's live price and order book are on its page.
Is Amazon funding its own customer? The circularity and concentration arithmetic
The objection to the stake is arithmetic, and the filings supply the numbers. Amazon has invested in two AI laboratories, and the same two are the only customers whose commitments the filings name beside the backlog figure Amazon cites for its capital spending. Money that leaves Amazon as an investment can return as revenue, which then supports more spending.
Say you add up the two labs' announced commitments. OpenAI's are $38 billion from November 2025 and $100 billion from February 2026, a total of $138 billion. Anthropic's expansion in the second quarter of 2026 was more than $100 billion over ten years (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). Together that is more than $238 billion of announced commitments against a backlog of about $496 billion, or more than 48% if every announced dollar sits inside the backlog figure, which the filing neither confirms nor denies. On the other side of the ledger, Amazon has put $50 billion into OpenAI. By June 30, 2026 it also held Anthropic notes and preferred stock carried at $190.4 billion, most of it gains recorded since Amazon paid $8 billion for the notes and $10 billion for preferred stock (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q).
Amazon's own answer is in its letter to shareholders. The company wrote that customer commitments "make our capex investments predictable", named the OpenAI commitment of over $100 billion as the example, and said it was "not investing approximately $200 billion in capex in 2026 on a hunch" (source: Amazon 2025 shareholder letter). The letter also gave the labs' scale in the company's own hedged words, as revenue run rates "reportedly approaching $30 billion" for each (source: Amazon 2025 shareholder letter). On the day of the deal Andy Jassy told CNBC that Trainium gives OpenAI 30 to 40% better price performance and that the investment would "yield a good return for Amazon over a long period of time" (source: Amazon, February 27, 2026).
The two readings use the same figures. A $138 billion commitment from a customer Amazon has funded with $50 billion is a concentration of AWS's growth in two private companies. It is also the most predictable demand a supplier can have, because the customer has contracted for it in writing and Amazon holds equity in the customer's success. What the filings do settle is scale. The $50 billion stake is about 1.8% of Amazon's $2.74 trillion market value at the September 18, 2026 close (source: Stock Analysis, AMZN statistics). The $138 billion contract, by contrast, is more than a year of AWS's 2025 sales of $128.7 billion (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K).
The OpenAI stake beside the Anthropic stake
Amazon holds both laboratories, and the two holdings have different shapes. The OpenAI position is $50 billion of preferred stock bought in five months of 2026 at one round's price. The Anthropic position began as $8 billion of convertible notes bought from 2023 to 2025, part of them since converted into preferred stock (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q).
Amazon added $10 billion of Anthropic preferred stock in the second quarter of 2026, in two purchases of $5 billion each (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q).
OpenAI | Anthropic | |
|---|---|---|
Instrument | Series C preferred stock | Convertible notes (2023 to 2025), then nonvoting preferred stock |
Cash invested | $50 billion (2026) | $8 billion in notes, plus $10 billion of preferred stock in Q2 2026 |
Carried at June 30, 2026 | $28.7 billion (cost; $21.3 billion more paid in July) | Notes $97.9 billion; preferred stock $92.5 billion |
Where gains go | Other income, only on an observable price change (none yet) | Notes: a reserve in equity ($92.0 billion unrealized); preferred: other income ($62.8 billion in H1 2026) |
Other terms | Letter agreement, spent | Ownership cap; financing facility |
The difference shows in the accounts. Anthropic's notes are available-for-sale securities, so their $92.0 billion unrealized gain sits in a reserve within equity, outside profit. The preferred stock that came from converting some of those notes has been written up through other income each time an Anthropic round set a new price (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). The OpenAI shares have seen no round since Amazon bought them, so they sit at cost. Anthropic's holding also carries an ownership cap and a financing facility, neither of which the OpenAI filing mentions (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). Amazon's Anthropic stake explained goes through the notes, the conversions and the cap.
What a holder of AMZNX or the AMZNUSDT Perpetual owns of the OpenAI stake
A holder of AMZNX owns the OpenAI stake in the same proportion as a holder of an Amazon share, and nothing more. AMZNX is a token backed one-for-one by an Amazon share held in custody, as what tokenized Amazon (AMZNX) is sets out, so it carries the parent's assets in the parent's proportions. OpenAI itself has no listed stock.
Say you hold 100 AMZNX. On September 21, 2026 the AMZNX/USDT pair traded at 255.78, so 100 tokens were about 25,578 USDT of exposure to the whole company. At cost, the OpenAI stake is $50 billion of a $2.74 trillion company, about 1.8%. On 10.79 billion shares that is about $4.63 per Amazon share, or about 460 USDT of your 100 tokens (source: Stock Analysis, AMZN statistics). That figure changes only when Amazon reprices the shares. What the market thinks the stake and the cloud contract are worth is already inside the Amazon share price, which the token follows, so the stake never appears in the token as a line of its own.
The AMZNUSDT Perpetual holds no Amazon asset at all: it is a leveraged contract on an index of the Amazon share price, with funding paid between longs and shorts every eight hours. A repricing of the OpenAI shares would therefore reach the contract only after it had moved the Amazon share price. On September 21, 2026 the contract traded at 256.21 against an index price of 256.03, with a funding rate of +0.0182%.
BloFin also lists the OPENAIUSDT Perpetual, live since July 6, 2026 with leverage up to 20 times, which on September 21, 2026 traded at 1,555.78 against an index price of 1,556.00. That contract settles in USDT against an index price the venue publishes for OpenAI. It carries no claim on OpenAI's shares or on Amazon's, and its price is separate from the cost at which Amazon carries its Series C stock and from the AMZN share price.
The token itself is bought after an xStocks eligibility check, the steps how to buy tokenized Amazon on BloFin walks through to a first order. What moves Amazon's stock price ranks the lines a results day does move, and the AWS growth rate leads them.
Looking to gain exposure to Amazon? To get started, you'll need to first create a BloFin account, fund your account with cryptocurrency, and navigate to the AMZNX/USDT Spot trading page or AMZNUSDT Perpetual page.
Frequently asked questions
Does Amazon own a stake in OpenAI?
Yes. Amazon owns $50 billion of OpenAI Group PBC's Series C Preferred Stock, bought in three payments between March and July 2026 through Amazon.com NV Investment Holdings LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary whose obligations the parent guaranteed (source: Amazon Form 8-K, February 27, 2026). The filings call the holding a variable interest in an entity Amazon does not consolidate, because Amazon is not its primary beneficiary (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). In plain terms, Amazon does not control OpenAI, so OpenAI's accounts are not folded into Amazon's, and OpenAI's own revenue and losses appear nowhere in Amazon's income statement.
How much of OpenAI does Amazon own?
Amazon's filings give the dollar amount, $50 billion, and never a percentage of OpenAI. The letter agreement does give the share count. Amazon bought 21,812,252 Series C shares for the first $15 billion and 50,895,254 more for the $35 billion, which is 72,707,506 shares at about $687.69 each (source: Amazon 8-K Exhibit 10.1, letter agreement). A percentage would also need OpenAI's total share count, which Amazon's filings do not give, so any percentage quoted elsewhere is an estimate built on a reported valuation of the round.
Is Amazon partnering with OpenAI, and what does AWS get?
Yes, through two agreements. In November 2025 OpenAI committed $38 billion to run workloads on AWS, starting immediately, on clusters of NVIDIA GB200 and GB300 processors with room to expand to tens of millions of CPUs (source: Amazon, November 3, 2025). All of that capacity is due before the end of 2026. In February 2026 the two companies expanded that by $100 billion over eight years. AWS became the exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider for OpenAI Frontier, gained a collaboration to build customized OpenAI models for Amazon's own applications, and gained a customer for about 2 gigawatts of its Trainium chips (source: Amazon and OpenAI joint release, February 27, 2026).
What happens to Amazon's OpenAI stake if OpenAI goes public?
The preferred shares convert into common stock, and Amazon becomes a shareholder in a listed company with a market price for the first time. Amazon expects a customary lock-up after any IPO, during which it could not sell, and ordinary securities-law restrictions after that (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). The shares would then be carried at market value, so each quarter's move in OpenAI's stock would pass through Amazon's other income, as its holdings in listed companies already do. Those listed holdings were $7.4 billion at June 30, 2026 (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q).
What is Amazon's own AI called, and does it compete with OpenAI?
Amazon's own models are the Nova family, which Amazon offers on Bedrock alongside models from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and others, so the same service sells both Amazon's models and OpenAI's (source: Amazon Q4 2025 results release). The February 2026 agreement added customized OpenAI models for Amazon's customer-facing applications, described as complementing Nova (source: Amazon and OpenAI joint release, February 27, 2026). Bedrock added more than 20 models in the fourth quarter of 2025, from providers including Amazon, Anthropic, Google and OpenAI, and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 during the second quarter of 2026 (source: Amazon Q2 2026 results release).
Researched and written by the BloFin Academy editorial team with AI-assisted drafting. All facts independently verified. Primary sources include Amazon's Form 8-K of February 27, 2026 and its exhibits, its first- and second-quarter 2026 Forms 10-Q, its 2025 Form 10-K and its quarterly results releases filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, its 2025 letter to shareholders, Amazon's and OpenAI's announcement pages, Stock Analysis for the market value at the September 18, 2026 close, and BloFin's AMZNX/USDT, AMZNUSDT and OPENAIUSDT pages, read on September 21, 2026.
Nothing in this article constitutes financial advice, and nothing in it states what OpenAI is worth, predicts whether or when it will list, or recommends buying, selling or holding Amazon in any form. The stake is carried at cost and can be written up or down only on an event Amazon does not control; the cloud contracts are commitments that become revenue only as computing is used, and part of them depends on Amazon's own chips performing. AMZNX tracks the share's price and carries the issuer's and custodians' risk in addition, and a leveraged position in AMZNUSDT or OPENAIUSDT can be liquidated by a single session's move. Past performance does not indicate future results. Do your own research and consider your risk tolerance before you trade on BloFin.