Why Microsoft Let OpenAI Play the Field
Strains in corporate relationships can lead to ugly breakups. But Microsoft and OpenAI are instead navigating a new era in their alliance that frees OpenAI to work with other cloud providers.
Over the past three years, as OpenAI swelled from a tiny research lab into the world’s most valuable startup, one company has captured nearly all of its billions of dollars in annual spending on the servers needed to power OpenAI’s artificial intelligence: Microsoft.
In recent months, though, OpenAI announced megadeals with several Microsoft rivals that show just how much the ChatGPT creator has outgrown the amount of computing capacity its onetime exclusive cloud partner can provide.
Those deals are so big that OpenAI plans to spend more money between now and the end of the decade to rent servers from those rivals—primarily Oracle—than with Microsoft itself, according to an OpenAI employee with knowledge of the situation. OpenAI has budgeted a staggering $450 billion in server expenses through 2030.