OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks during the 2026 Infrastructure Summit for government officials, corporate executives, and labor leaders, in Washington, DC, US, March 11, 2026.
Kylie Cooper | Reuters
OpenAI and Microsoft on Monday announced a revised partnership agreement that would allow the intelligence firm to hold fee-sharing payments and serve clients on any cloud provider.
As part of the new agreement, the companies said that the royalty payments from OpenAI to Microsoft “will be contingent on the overall completion,” but will continue until 2030, “independent of the advancement of OpenAI’s technology.” Microsoft no longer needs to decide its response if OpenAI finds that it has reached artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which is the term for an AI system that rivals or surpasses human intelligence.
A profit sharing agreement between the two companies has been in place for years. OpenAI will pay Microsoft the same percentage, 20%, as part of the new agreement, according to a source familiar with the deal who asked not to be identified because the information is confidential. Microsoft will no longer pay a share of the money to OpenAI, according to the blog.
The two companies said Microsoft remains the primary cloud provider for OpenAI, and that OpenAI products will be shipped first on Azure unless Microsoft decides otherwise. However, OpenAI can now offer “all of its products” to customers from any provider, including Microsoft’s competitors Amazon again Google.
Microsoft has been one of OpenAI’s long-time backers, investing more than $13 billion in the company as of 2019. The companies have continued to tout their relationship as important and strategic, but it has shown signs of strain in recent months as partners move into each other’s territory. In a memo earlier this month, Denise Dresser, OpenAI’s chief revenue officer, said the partnership “reduced our ability to meet businesses where they are.”
“Today, we’re announcing an amended agreement to simplify partnerships and the way we work together, based on flexibility, certainty, and a focus on delivering the benefits of AI more broadly,” OpenAI said.
Microsoft will continue to license OpenAI’s intellectual property for AI models until 2032, although the license will no longer be exclusive, the two companies said.
Microsoft shares fell about 1% on Monday.
The enhanced partnership comes after Microsoft and OpenAI announced a series of changes to their agreement in October, when OpenAI completed refinancing and committed to spend $250 billion on Microsoft Azure cloud services. As part of that announcement, Microsoft said its investment arm is worth about $135 billion, or about 27% of the company on an adjusted basis.
But in the coming months, OpenAI has been looking to diversify its reach, striking multibillion-dollar deals with Microsoft competitors such as Amazon. Model developers see customers using AI agents to perform tasks in a matter of hours. In recent weeks Meta committed to spending $48 billion with cloud providers CoreWeave again Nebius to increase its computing power.
Amazon and OpenAI formed a major strategic partnership in February, and Amazon agreed to invest up to $50 billion in the company as part of that deal. OpenAI said it will expand its existing $38 billion deal with Amazon Web Services by $100 billion over the next eight years. AWS will also serve as the exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider for OpenAI’s enterprise platform Frontier, which it unveiled earlier this month.
After that announcement, Microsoft and OpenAI released a joint statement that said their partnership remains “strong and central.”
– CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.
