Microsoft ups its investment in OpenAI’s supercomputer plans

Microsoft and OpenAI have announced a multi-year, multi-billion dollar investment as part of the third phase of their long-term partnership. The move builds on previous investments made by Microsoft in OpenAI in 2019 and 2021 and will extend the companies' collaboration across AI supercomputing and research, enabling each of them to independently commercialise advanced AI technologies.

As part of the agreement, Microsoft will increase its investments in the development and deployment of specialised supercomputing systems to accelerate OpenAI's independent AI research. This will enable the AI research firm to continue to push the boundaries of AI research and develop new breakthroughs, say the companies

Microsoft will also continue to build out Azure's leading AI infrastructure, which will help customers build and deploy AI applications globally. In addition to this, Microsoft will deploy OpenAI's models across its consumer and enterprise products and will 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 trusted, enterprise-grade capabilities and AI-optimized infrastructure and tools. Azure will power all OpenAI workloads across research, products, and API services.

Microsoft and OpenAI take technology to next phase

“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,” says Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, 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,” says 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.”

Through its initial investment and collaboration, Microsoft and OpenAI pushed the frontier of cloud supercomputing technology, announcing their first top-five supercomputer in 2020. OpenAI has used this infrastructure to train its breakthrough models, which are now deployed in Azure to power AI products, including GitHub Copilot, DALL·E 2 and ChatGPT.