Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was asked directly by Wall Street analysts on Wednesday local time how Microsoft's revised partnership with OpenAI would affect the company's financial performance. In this regard, Nadella said that this new agreement is a good deal for all parties, and emphasized that he always focuses on the "win-win" structure in the partnership, because only in this way can the partnership be maintained in the long term.
Nadella pointed out that Microsoft still retains the right to use OpenAI's intellectual property, including its models and agent products, but unlike before, Microsoft no longer needs to pay OpenAI for these technologies. When talking about Microsoft's royalty-free use of OpenAI's most advanced AI technology until 2032, Nadella said that Microsoft has a cutting-edge model and has corresponding intellectual property access rights. This right will last until 2032, and Microsoft "fully intends to make full use of it."
Previously, there had been widespread speculation that under this new agreement, Microsoft would no longer have exclusive access to OpenAI technology, which may weaken its leading edge in the field of artificial intelligence. At the same time, OpenAI also quickly announced that it would launch exclusive AI products with Amazon, Microsoft's biggest competitor in the field of cloud computing, further intensifying market discussions on Microsoft's competitive position.
Nadella, however, shrugged off these concerns. In its financial report released on Wednesday—which was also the last quarter under which the old agreement took full effect—Microsoft disclosed that its annualized revenue from its AI business had exceeded US$37 billion, a year-on-year increase of 123%. This number shows that despite changes in cooperation models, Microsoft's AI business and cloud business still maintain strong growth momentum.
Nadella also said that Microsoft can still generate revenue from OpenAI in other ways. He said that OpenAI itself is an important customer of Microsoft. It will not only use Microsoft's AI accelerator-related services, but also purchase other computing resources, so Microsoft hopes to continue to provide high-quality services to it; in addition, Microsoft also holds equity in OpenAI. The article further pointed out that the value mentioned by Nadella includes both OpenAI's commitment to purchase more than 250 billion US dollars in Microsoft cloud services, and the 27% stake in OpenAI held by Microsoft.
When talking about the needs of enterprise customers, Nadella emphasized that many enterprises today want to use multiple AI models at the same time, so the relative importance of OpenAI in the entire industry, especially in the enterprise market, is no longer as far ahead as it was in the past. He said that Microsoft, as a very large-scale cloud service provider, provides the widest range of model choices. Customers can choose between OpenAI, Anthropic, open source models and other solutions according to different workloads. Currently, more than 10,000 customers have used more than one model.
The report finally pointed out that whether this new agreement can truly achieve a "win-win" in the end remains to be tested by time; but at least at the current stage, Microsoft is still continuing to deliver a solid report card of cloud business growth and profit performance.