Microsoft announced the third phase of its long-term partnership with OpenAI through a multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment. The agreement extends their ongoing collaboration across AI supercomputing and research and enables each company to independently commercialise the resulting advanced AI technologies.
As part of the partnership, Microsoft will increase its investments in the development and deployment of specialised supercomputing systems to accelerate OpenAI’s independent AI research. Microsoft will also continue to build out Azure’s leading AI infrastructure to help customers build and deploy their AI applications on a global scale. Additionally, Microsoft will deploy OpenAI’s models across its consumer and enterprise products and introduce new categories of digital experiences built on OpenAI’s technology.
As OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider, Azure will power all OpenAI workloads across research, products, and API services. This partnership will provide developers and organisations across industries access to the best AI infrastructure, models, and toolchain with Azure to build and run their applications.
“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.”
“The past three years of our partnership have been great,” said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. “Microsoft shares our values and we are excited to continue our independent research and work toward creating advanced AI that benefits everyone.”
Since 2016, Microsoft has committed to building Azure into an AI supercomputer for the world, serving as the foundation of its vision to democratize AI as a platform. Through its initial investment and collaboration, Microsoft and OpenAI pushed the frontier of cloud supercomputing technology, announcing its first top-5 supercomputer in 2020, and subsequently constructing multiple AI supercomputing systems at massive scale.
Underpinning all of their efforts is Microsoft and OpenAI’s shared commitment to building AI systems and products that are trustworthy and safe. OpenAI’s leading research on AI Alignment and Microsoft’s Responsible AI Standard not only establish a leading and advancing framework for the safe deployment of their own AI technologies, but will also help guide the industry toward more responsible outcomes.
In pursuit of its mission to ensure advanced AI benefits all of humanity, OpenAI remains a capped-profit company and is governed by the OpenAI non-profit. This structure allows the company to raise the capital it needs to fulfill its mission without sacrificing its core beliefs about broadly sharing benefits and the need to prioritise safety.
