On Tuesday, AI company Recursive Superintelligence announced a $410 million compute deal with Amazon Web Services. The company, which emerged from stealth in May with $650 million in funding, is focused on building open-ended self-improving systems - a compute-intensive approach that sounds expensive and is, in fact, expensive. This multi-year deal is meant to provide flexibility as the company scales up those systems, because nothing says flexibility like committing nearly two-thirds of your fundraising to one cloud provider.

Recursive’s $410 million outlay represents the bulk of the company’s fundraising to date, but on a call with TechCrunch, CEO Socher emphasized he expects this to be the first of many such deals. Today’s announcement is “likely going to be one of the smallest compute deals we’re going to sign in the next few years,” Socher said, presumably while accountants wept softly in the background.

Recursive’s emphasis on self-improving AI means much of the budget that traditionally goes to headcount and operations is instead poured straight into compute, as the company seeks to automate its own product development process. “For us, it’s less about headcount and more about agent count,” Socher said. Because why hire humans when you can just rent more servers?

There’s no investment component to Amazon’s involvement, unlike the hybrid investment deals common among major labs. But the sheer scale of the commitment allows AWS to dedicate significant resources to supporting Recursive’s unique needs, which may help attract other foundational AI companies. “Part of the agreement is that we’re going to co-develop infrastructure purpose-built for these types of companies,” said Jason Bennett, VP for startups and venture capital at AWS. Translation: Amazon gets a new customer and a fancy new sandbox.

Recursive self-improvement (RSI) has long been seen as an AI inflection point, with some expecting an explosion of progress once AI can improve without human involvement. But as more labs pursue the idea, the specific requirements have become ambiguous - some predict an imminent breakthrough, others see it as more of a continuum. In Recursive’s case, the goal is to use RSI to develop actual products, and Socher expects to release early examples before the end of the year. “We are excited to build really amazing products that people can use, and you will see those within a few months, not within a few quarters or years,” Socher said. “In October or so, you’ll see some actually tangible, useful things that you’ll be able to play around with.” Mark your calendars, folks.