• by Laurie Sullivan , Yesterday

OpenAI has restructured its partnership with Microsoft, allowing it to sell its AI models across multiple cloud providers.

The shift enables the company to build stronger ties with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and other enterprise companies. 

The change ends OpenAI's exclusive partnership with Microsoft and enables it to expand services with AWS and Google Cloud. 

Azure remains OpenAI's primary cloud partner through 2032. New products will continue to launch first on Azure unless Microsoft chooses not to support them.

For advertisers, this partnership simplifies the bridge between high-end creative AI and massive customer datasets that already exist in AWS. It moves AI from a tool that developers "play" with to a deeply integrated part of the ad-tech stack.

The revised partnership also means Microsoft will no longer pay a revenue share to OpenAI, which traded the steady income from Microsoft's cloud sales in exchange for independence.

This means OpenAI can eventually keep all its profits and sell its models on AWS and Google Cloud without Microsoft's permission.

Previously, each time Microsoft sold OpenAI’s technology to an Azure customer, Microsoft gave revenue share to OpenAI. Microsoft now keeps all the money it earns from selling OpenAI models on its cloud services

OpenAI still pays Microsoft 20% of the money it makes from its own sales, including ChatGPT Plus subscriptions, as well as a maximum amount that OpenAI will pay until 2030.

But now there is a cap, although the amount has not been disclosed. Once the cap is reached, OpenAI can stop paying Microsoft based on sales. Microsoft explained the new relationship in a blog post.

"While this amendment simplifies the partnership, the work we’re doing together remains ambitious," Microsoft wrote in the post.

"From scaling gigawatts of new datacenter capacity, to collaborating on next-generation silicon, to applying AI to advance cybersecurity, and more, we’re excited to keep partnering to advance and scale AI for people and organizations around the world."

"We're excited to make OpenAI's models available directly to customers on Bedrock in the coming weeks," Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote on X Monday.

Tuesday brought news about expansion plans between OpenAI and AWS from Amazon's conference in San Francisco. 

The expanded partnership with Amazon brings together three key, limited previews on AWS from OpenAI to AWS.

OpenAI models, Codex, and Amazon Bedrock managed agents powered by OpenAI. Codex is a way to build production-ready AI agents with OpenAI frontier models on AWS.