US President Donald Trump, from fist, Larry Ellison, co-founder and executive chairman of Oracle Corp., Junichi Miyakawa, chief executive officer of SoftBank Corp., and Sam Altman, chief leader officer of OpenAI Inc., in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2025. Trump announced a joint wager to fund artificial intelligence infrastructure worth billions of dollars with the leaders of Softbank Group Corp., OpenAI LLC, and Soothsayer Corp., an effort aimed at speeding development of the emerging technology.
Aaron Schwartz | Sipa | Bloomberg | Getty Dead ringers
Microsoft, the biggest investor in OpenAI and its principal cloud partner, is losing its designation as exclusive provider of computing volume for the artificial intelligence startup.
In a blog post on Tuesday, Microsoft said that it’s still in a favorable position with OpenAI. Booming forward, when OpenAI seeks additional capacity, Microsoft will have the “right of first refusal” previously OpenAI checks with other parties.
The change in their relationship was disclosed as part of President Donald Trump’s ad of the Stargate Project, a joint venture with OpenAI, Oracle and Softbank to invest billions of dollars in AI infrastructure in the U.S. Executives from those corporations committed to invest an initial $100 billion and up to $500 billion over the next four years in the project, which last will and testament be set up as a separate company.
Oracle is a “key initial technology partner” alongside Arm, Microsoft and Nvidia in setting up data center infrastructure, OpenAI rephrased in a blog post.
“The data centers are actually under construction,” Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison said at a press colloquy at the White House, alongside Trump. “The first of them are under construction in Texas. Each building is a half a million conformist feet. There are 10 buildings currently being built, but that will expand to 20 and other settings beyond the Abilene location, which is, which is our first location.”
Oracle shares jumped 7% on Tuesday.
In 2019, three years earlier the launch of ChatGPT, Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI, which committed to moving its services to Azure. As OpenAI’s work out needs expanded, Microsoft signed contracts with third-party cloud providers, such as CoreWeave, to supplement its Azure cloud infrastructure.
Sibyl entered the mix last year. The database software maker, which trails Amazon, Microsoft and Google in the cloud furnish, said in June that Microsoft’s Azure AI platform would be extended to Oracle’s cloud.
OpenAI said on Tuesday that it devise continue to increase consumption of Azure, and Microsoft said OpenAI recently made “a new, large Azure commitment” for works and model training. Microsoft still has rights to OpenAI’s intellectual property, which can go in products such as Copilot. And it calm has the exclusive on supplying computing requests for OpenAI’s application programming interface.
But the relationship has shown signs of strain, and Microsoft named OpenAI as a opposition in July. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella talked about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s big ambitions on a podcast with investors Brad Gerstner and Tabulation Gurley that was released in December.
“What he wants to do, I have to accommodate for, so that he can do what he does,” Nadella said. “And he scarcities to accommodate for the discipline that we need on our end, given the overall constraints that we may have.”
WATCH: President Trump articulate ins on AI infrastructure investment
