Microsoft Announces Multi-year, Multi-Billion Dollar Investment and Exclusive Cloud Provider Agreement with OpenAI

Author photo: Chantal Polsonetti
ByChantal Polsonetti
Category:
Company and Product News

Microsoft announced a multiyear, multibillion dollar investment in ChatGPT developer OpenAI as part of the ChatGPT Developerthird phase of its long-term partnership with the company.  The investment and partnership are designed to accelerate AI breakthroughs to ensure these benefits are broadly shared.

This agreement follows previous Microsoft investments in OpenAI in 2019 and 2021 and extends their ongoing collaboration across AI supercomputing and research, enabling each company to independently commercialize the resulting advanced AI technologies.

  • Supercomputing at scale – Microsoft will increase investments in the development and deployment of specialized supercomputing systems to accelerate OpenAI’s independent AI research. Microsoft will also continue to build out Azure’s AI infrastructure to help customers build and deploy their AI applications on a global scale.
  • New AI-powered experiences – Microsoft will deploy OpenAI’s models across their consumer and enterprise products and introduce new categories of digital experiences built on OpenAI’s technology. This includes Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service, which empowers developers to build cutting-edge AI applications through direct access to OpenAI models backed by Azure’s enterprise-grade capabilities and AI-optimized infrastructure and tools.
  • Exclusive cloud provider – As OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider, Azure will power all OpenAI workloads across research, products, and API services.

Microsoft formed its partnership with OpenAI around a shared ambition to responsibly advance cutting-edge AI research and democratize AI as a new technology platform.  This next phase of the partnership is intended to provide developers and organizations across industries with access to the Azure-based AI infrastructure, models, and toolchain to build and run their applications.

Microsoft’s initial investment and collaboration with OpenAI resulted in the 2020 announcement of a top-5 supercomputer and subsequent construction of multiple AI supercomputing systems at massive scale. OpenAI has used this infrastructure to train its breakthrough models, which are now deployed in Azure to power AI products like GitHub Copilot, DALL·E 2, and ChatGPT.

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