OpenAI announces continuing partnership terms with Microsoft
Issued the same day as OpenAI's $110 billion Amazon-led funding round, it clarified that Azure keeps exclusivity over stateless API calls and Microsoft its IP licence.
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Microsoft and OpenAI issued a joint statement clarifying the terms of their partnership on the same day OpenAI announced $110 billion in new funding led by Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank, alongside an expanded cloud-compute agreement with Amazon Web Services. The statement said it was issued because “as conversations around AI investments and partnerships grow and as OAI announces new funding and new partners… we want to ensure these announcements are understood within the existing construct of our partnership.”
The companies said nothing in the new arrangements changed terms the two firms had set out in an October 2025 restructuring. Microsoft said it retained its “exclusive license and access to intellectual property across OpenAI models and products,” and that Azure remained “the exclusive cloud provider of stateless OpenAI APIs” — meaning that any API calls resulting from OpenAI’s collaboration with a third party, including Amazon, would still be hosted on Azure rather than a rival cloud. The statement also confirmed the existing revenue-share arrangement between the companies was unchanged and had always contemplated OpenAI partnering with other cloud providers.
The statement functioned as reassurance to investors and the market that Microsoft’s economic position in OpenAI was not being displaced by the new capital and compute deals, at a moment when OpenAI was rapidly diversifying its infrastructure and investor base beyond the company that had backed it since 2019.