U.S. President Donald Trump, from left, Larry Ellison, co-founder and CEO of Oracle Corp., Junichi Miyakawa, CEO of SoftBank Corp., and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI Inc., in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC , USA, on Tuesday, January 21, 2025. Trump announced a joint venture to finance a multibillion-dollar artificial intelligence infrastructure with Softbank Group Corp. executives OpenAI LLC. and Oracle Corp., an initiative aimed at accelerating development of the new technology.
Aaron Schwartz | Sipa | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Microsoftthe largest investor in OpenAI and its main cloud partner, is losing its designation as the exclusive provider of computing capacity to the artificial intelligence startup.
In a blog post on Tuesday, Microsoft said it was still in a favorable position with OpenAI. If OpenAI seeks additional capacity in the future, Microsoft will have the “right of first refusal” before OpenAI consults with other parties.
The change in their relationship was announced as part of President Donald Trump's announcement of the Stargate project, a joint venture with OpenAI. oracle and Softbank will invest billions of dollars in AI infrastructure in the US. Executives from these companies have committed to investing an initial $100 billion and up to $500 billion over the next four years in the project, which will be established as a standalone company.
Oracle is also an “important first technology partner”. armMicrosoft and Nvidia in building data center infrastructure, OpenAI said in a blog post.
“The data centers are actually under construction,” Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison said at a White House press conference alongside Trump. “The first of these are under construction in Texas. Each building is half a million square feet. There are currently 10 buildings being built, but that will expand to 20 and additional locations beyond the Abilene location, which is our first location.”
Oracle shares rose 7% on Tuesday.
In 2019, three years before the launch of ChatGPT, Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI and committed to moving its services to Azure. As OpenAI's computing needs increased, Microsoft signed deals with third-party cloud providers such as CoreWeave to complement its Azure cloud infrastructure.
oracle was added last year. The database software maker that is lagging behind AmazonMicrosoft and Google in the cloud market, said in June that Microsoft's Azure AI platform would be extended to Oracle's cloud.
OpenAI said Tuesday that it would continue to increase its use of Azure, and Microsoft said OpenAI recently made “a new, major Azure commitment” for products and model training. Microsoft still owns rights to OpenAI's intellectual property, which may be included in products such as Copilot. And it still has the exclusive right to provide computing requests to OpenAI's application programming interface.
But the relationship showed signs of strain, and Microsoft named OpenAI as a competitor in July. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella spoke about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's big ambitions in a podcast with investors Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley released in December.
“What he wants to do is something I have to take into account so he can do what he does,” Nadella said. “And he has to adjust to the discipline that we need on our part, given the general limitations that we may have.”
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