Although the partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI has been described as "turbulent" by the outside world many times, as the artificial intelligence laboratory's revenue grows rapidly, Microsoft, as one of its major investors, is receiving considerable returns from it. In its latest quarterly financial report released on Wednesday, Microsoft disclosed that US$7.6 billion of the company's net profit came from its investment income in OpenAI, highlighting the role of this strategic bet in driving overall performance.
According to previously disclosed documents, there is allegedly a revenue sharing agreement of approximately 20% between OpenAI and Microsoft, but the two parties have never officially confirmed this ratio in public. To date, Microsoft has invested more than US$13 billion in OpenAI, and according to previous reports by Bloomberg, OpenAI is currently seeking to raise additional financing at a valuation of US$750 billion to US$830 billion in an attempt to further expand its global AI footprint.
In September 2025, as OpenAI reorganized its for-profit business into a public welfare company structure, the two parties also renegotiated and adjusted some cooperation terms. As part of the new agreement, OpenAI committed to purchasing an additional $250 billion in Microsoft Azure cloud services. This huge commitment is directly reflected in Microsoft's financial statements under the "unfulfilled commercial contractual obligations" item. This indicator jumped to US$625 billion this quarter from US$392 billion in the previous quarter, of which approximately 45% came from OpenAI-related contracts, indicating that OpenAI’s continued role in driving Microsoft’s cloud business in the next few years has been basically locked in.
Another AI unicorn, Anthropic, was also named in this quarter's results and has become one of Microsoft's expected important sources of future revenue. Microsoft said that driven by customers such as Anthropic, the company's commercial bookings increased by 230% year-on-year. In November 2025, Microsoft announced an investment of US$5 billion in Anthropic, which signed a US$30 billion Azure computing power purchase agreement with Microsoft and stated that it would purchase more cloud computing resources in the future.
However, in order to meet the massive computing power demands from AI customers such as OpenAI and Anthropic, Microsoft has also invested heavily in infrastructure. The company's capital expenditures reached $37.5 billion in the quarter, about two-thirds of which were invested in what Microsoft calls "short-lived assets" hardware equipment, namely a large number of GPUs and CPUs used for Azure cloud and AI workloads.
At the overall business level, Microsoft's revenue this quarter reached US$81.3 billion, significantly higher than Wall Street analysts' previous market expectations of US$80.27 billion, a year-on-year increase of 17%. Among them, Microsoft's cloud business quarterly revenue exceeded US$50 billion for the first time, continuing to become the core engine of the company's growth. Except for a few sectors, all of Microsoft's major business lines achieved double-digit year-on-year growth: Windows device business only increased slightly by 1%, almost flat, while Xbox content and service revenue fell by 5% year-on-year, becoming one of the few dragging items in the overall report card.
It can be seen from this quarter's performance that the long-term layout around AI partners such as OpenAI and Anthropic is becoming a key pivot for Microsoft's profitability and cloud business growth. Behind the huge capital expenditures and high-intensity investment in computing power, Microsoft is trying to lay a more solid foundation for its performance in the next few years with pre-locked cloud service contracts and rapidly growing AI-related revenue.