OpenAI models head to rival clouds
- Microsoft and OpenAI amended their partnership on April 27, letting OpenAI sell products across any cloud while Microsoft keeps primary-partner status on Azure. - Microsoft’s OpenAI license is now non-exclusive through 2032, and Microsoft will stop paying OpenAI revenue share while capped payments from OpenAI continue. - The shift extends a 2025 loosening of exclusivity and clears paths to Amazon, Google and Oracle clouds. (blogs.microsoft.com)
Microsoft and OpenAI rewrote their partnership on April 27, ending Microsoft’s exclusive right to distribute OpenAI models and products. (blogs.microsoft.com) Microsoft said it remains OpenAI’s “primary cloud partner,” and OpenAI products will still ship first on Azure unless Microsoft cannot support the needed capabilities. (blogs.microsoft.com) The new agreement also lets OpenAI “serve all its products to customers across any cloud provider,” a direct break from the earlier setup that kept the OpenAI API exclusive to Azure. (blogs.microsoft.com 1) (blogs.microsoft.com 2) Microsoft said its license to OpenAI intellectual property for models and products now runs through 2032 on a non-exclusive basis. Microsoft also said it will no longer pay a revenue share to OpenAI. (blogs.microsoft.com) Payments in the other direction remain in place. Microsoft said revenue-share payments from OpenAI to Microsoft continue through 2030 at the same percentage, subject to a total cap. (blogs.microsoft.com) This is the second major loosening in 15 months. In January 2025, Microsoft said exclusivity on new capacity was already shifting to a right-of-first-refusal model, while the OpenAI API stayed exclusive to Azure. (blogs.microsoft.com) The immediate commercial effect showed up at Amazon. SiliconANGLE reported that Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy said OpenAI models would reach Amazon Bedrock within weeks. (siliconangle.com) OpenAI had already been spreading its infrastructure beyond Microsoft. Reuters reported in June 2025 that OpenAI finalized a deal in May 2025 to add Google Cloud for computing capacity. (usnews.com) OpenAI also deepened its Oracle relationship in July 2025, saying the companies would develop 4.5 gigawatts of additional Stargate data-center capacity in the United States. (openai.com) For customers, the change means OpenAI can be bought and deployed without forcing every workload onto Azure first. Azure still keeps first-call status, but it no longer keeps the field to itself. (blogs.microsoft.com)
