Microsoft expands ties with OpenAI, invests billions

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Microsoft expands ties with OpenAI with a multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment to accelerate AI development

Redmond, USA: Under a multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment to push AI development, Microsft expands ties with OpenAI. Microsoft announced the third phase of its long-term ties with the artificial intelligence research laboratory OpenAI on Monday.

“We formed our partnership with OpenAI around a shared ambition to responsibly advance cutting-edge AI research and democratise AI as a new technology platform,” said Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO of Microsoft.

“In this next phase of our partnership, developers and organisations across industries will have access to the best AI infrastructure, models, and toolchain with Azure to build and run their applications,” added Nadella.

Prior to this investment, Microsoft invested in OpenAI in 2019 and 2021.

“The past three years of our partnership have been great,” said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI – the maker of ChatGPT.

“Microsoft shares our values and we are excited to continue our independent research and work toward creating advanced AI that benefits everyone,” added Altman.

Microsoft hasn’t shared the details of its OpenAI investment but media reports speculate this investment to be around $10 billion.

Microsoft expands ties with OpenAI

With this latest investment, Microsoft and OpenAI have further extended their ongoing collaboration across AI supercomputing and research. Interestingly, this engagement will enable both Microsoft and OpenAI to independently commercialise the resulting advanced AI technologies.

The two companies are closely collaborating in three specific areas – supercomputing at scale, new AI-powered experiences and cloud.

Supercomputing

For Supercomputing at scale, Microsoft will increase its investments in the development and deployment of specialised supercomputing systems to speed up OpenAI’s independent AI research.

This takes further the existing engagement between the companies on the cloud supercomputing technology front. In 2020, they jointly announced their first top-5 supercomputer and later developed multiple AI supercomputing systems at a massive scale.

“We will also continue to build out Azure’s leading AI infrastructure to help customers build and deploy their AI applications on a global scale,” Nadella said in the company’s blog.

New AI-powered experiences, exclusive cloud provider

To offer new AI-powered experiences, Microsoft will deploy OpenAI’s models across its consumer and enterprise products and introduce new categories of digital experiences built on OpenAI’s technology.

This also includes Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service for developers to build cutting-edge AI applications through direct access to OpenAI models backed by Azure’s capabilities and AI-optimized infrastructure and tools.

Microsoft Azure becomes an exclusive cloud provider to OpenAI and will power all its workloads across research, products and API services.

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