Microsoft reaffirms that its partnership with OpenAI remains unchanged: Azure remains the exclusive cloud provider, and the relationship between both parties is stable.

IT之家 February 27 news: Since 2019, Microsoft and OpenAI have been working together.

As discussions around AI investment and cooperation have grown increasingly frequent, and as OpenAI today announced new funding and reached a deeper level of collaboration with Amazon, Microsoft and OpenAI once again reaffirmed their partnership—any announcement today does not change the cooperation terms between the two parties that were already disclosed in the joint blog in October 2025.

The two sides said that their cooperation relationship remains firm and is still at the core of their relationship. Microsoft and OpenAI continue to work closely together in research, engineering, and product development, building on years of deep collaboration and shared success.

At the same time, the intellectual property relationship remains unchanged. Microsoft continues to retain exclusive licensing and access rights to OpenAI models and products’ intellectual property. Like the collaboration between OpenAI and Amazon, this is precisely the kind of situation that was already anticipated in the parties’ agreements, and Microsoft welcomes the results of that cooperation.

In addition, the business and revenue-sharing relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI also remains unchanged. The existing revenue-sharing arrangements have not been adjusted, and they have always included revenue sharing from cooperation between OpenAI and other cloud providers.

Microsoft emphasized that Azure remains the exclusive cloud provider for the stateless OpenAI API. Microsoft is the exclusive cloud provider for stateless APIs that provide access to OpenAI models and intellectual property. These APIs can be purchased through Microsoft or directly through OpenAI. Customers and developers benefit from Azure’s global infrastructure, security, and enterprise-grade scaling capabilities. Stateless API calls to OpenAI models generated by OpenAI’s collaboration with any third party (including Amazon) will be hosted on Azure. OpenAI’s own products, including Frontier, will continue to be hosted on Azure.

In other respects, AGI definitions and processes remain unchanged as well. The contractual definition of general artificial intelligence and the determination process for whether it has been achieved remain unchanged.

The two sides said that the original intention behind the design of this partnership is to create room for Microsoft and OpenAI to conduct independent exploration of new opportunities while maintaining collaboration—two companies are currently doing exactly that: there is cooperation, and there are independent actions as well.

We will continue to work toward our partnership, and toward the shared mission that initially brought us together. We will continue to work side by side to deliver powerful AI tools, drive responsible research and development, and ensure that AI benefits people and organizations around the world.