OpenAI and Microsoft have reached a new agreement that preserves and builds on key elements from the initial, landmark partnership between the two industry icons.
As part of the transaction, OpenAI will remain Microsoft’s frontier model partner. The agreement also refines and adds new provisions that enable each company to independently continue advancing innovation and growth. New aspects of the partnership include OpenAI’s rights to jointly develop some products with third parties; provide API access to US government national security customers; and release open weight models that meet requisite capability criteria.
Additionally, OpenAI has agreed to purchase an incremental $250 billion of Azure services, and Microsoft will no longer have a right of first refusal to be OpenAI’s compute provider.
The S&C team advising OpenAI on the partnership and Azure compute transactions included Nader Mousavi and Mark Schenkel.
S&C regularly advises clients on their most important and complex technology-driven transactions. Our recent work includes advising OpenAI in:
- its strategic partnership with AMD to deploy six gigawatts of AMD GPUs to power OpenAI’s next-generation AI infrastructure;
- its transaction with Oracle for data center services, which will provide 4.5 gigawatts of capacity as part of Stargate, the $500 billion data center building project of OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank;
- its strategic partnership with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) for use of Google Cloud’s computing infrastructure to train AI models and address growing demands for computing power; and
- its joint venture with SoftBank to develop and market Advanced Enterprise AI in Japan called “Cristal intelligence.”