In 2024, a report claimed that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates remains intimately involved in the company’s affairs. despite leaving the board of directors to focus on philanthropy. Furthermore, he revealed that the executive’s word is treated as gospel and that he played a crucial role in fostering Partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI.
Interestingly, a separate report revealed that Bill Gates He was initially skeptical about Microsoft investing $1 billion in OpenAImainly due to its non-profit structure. “You’re going to burn this billion dollars.” Gates warned.
For context, most of this revenue comes from OpenAI’s infrastructure needs, and reports suggest that the ChatGPT The manufacturer spent up to $23 billion between 2023 and 2025 to rent Azure servers from Microsoft. The rest of the revenue comes from AI-based products and services, such as Office 365 Copilot and GitHub Co-pilot.
That said, the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership has evolved significantly over the past year, the first signing a new definitive agreement in October 2025, that will allow OpenAI to sever its ties with Microsoft only after an independent body verifies that the AI company has indeed achieved artificial general intelligence (AGI).
As OpenAI evolved into a for-profit entity To secure more funding from investors, Microsoft now owns a 27% stake, which translates to approximately $135 billion.
The partnership also recently became non-exclusive.. This means that Microsoft will no longer have to pay OpenAI a revenue share. The new deal capped OpenAI’s revenue-sharing payments at $38 billion through 2030, saving it roughly $97 billion compared to the terms of the original deal.
It’s worth noting that the tech giant remains OpenAI’s primary cloud partner and its products will ship on Azure first. However, the ChatGPT manufacturer can still offer all of its products to customers through any cloud provider if it fails or decides not to support the necessary capabilities.
Microsoft partnership appears fractured
It’s no secret that there has been a bit of tension between Microsoft and OpenAI. Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAIciting that the company defrauded him out of millions of dollars using a false humanitarian mission with the help of Microsoft, it doesn’t make things better.
Microsoft has been taking elaborate steps, seemingly emancipating itself from an over-reliance on OpenAI for its technologies, including developing your own internal frontier AI models.
sales force CEO Marc Benioff predicted that Microsoft would not use OpenAI in the futureshortly after the company announced its now-cancelled $500 billion Stargate project, which was designed to build data centers across the United States to meet its computing power needs.
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