OpenAI Brings GPT-5.5 and Codex to AWS, Breaking Microsoft's Grip

For years, if you wanted OpenAI's best models in a production enterprise environment, you had one real option: go through Azure. That just changed. OpenAI's frontier models and Codex are now generally available on Amazon Bedrock, opening a second major cloud distribution channel for OpenAI capabilities and putting real pressure on Microsoft's historically exclusive grip on enterprise OpenAI access.

What's actually shipping

One month after the expanded partnership announcement, GPT-5.5, GPT-5.4, and Codex are now generally available on Amazon Bedrock, giving customers access to frontier models and the OpenAI coding agent for software development. There are two distinct products here:

• OpenAI models on Amazon Bedrock -- GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.4 available through the Responses API, callable with the same AWS SDK and IAM controls you already use. Both run on Bedrock's next-generation inference engine, built for high performance, reliability, and security, with pricing that matches OpenAI rates and no additional fees.
• Codex on Amazon Bedrock -- available through the Codex App, CLI, and IDE integrations, with all inference routed through Amazon Bedrock and the same security protections -- including IAM, VPC isolation, and encryption -- that customers already use on AWS.

Codex will be available through Bedrock via the Codex CLI, desktop app, and VS Code extension. JetBrains and Xcode are also supported. Usage of both OpenAI models and Codex can be applied toward existing AWS cloud commitments, which is a significant procurement win for teams that already have AWS spend commitments to burn through.

The deal behind the deal

This GA launch is the first visible product milestone of a much larger strategic bet. OpenAI and Amazon announced a multi-year strategic partnership, with Amazon committing to invest $50 billion in OpenAI -- starting with an initial $15 billion investment, followed by another $35 billion when certain conditions are met.