Written by Stephen Nellis and Crystal Ho
(Reuters) – Microsoft (MSFT) said on Tuesday it had changed some key terms of a deal with OpenAI after the ChatGPT creator announced a joint venture with Oracle (ORCL) and Japan’s SoftBank Group to build up to $500 billion of new artificial intelligence data centers in the United States. United.
President Donald Trump gathered leaders of the Stargate project at the White House on Tuesday to announce the deal, saying it aims to help keep the United States ahead of China and other competitors in the global race for artificial intelligence, using chips from Nvidia. NVDA).
Since 2019, Microsoft has had an arrangement with OpenAI that gives the Redmond, Washington-based company the exclusive right to build new computing infrastructure for OpenAI. In a blog post, Microsoft said it had “approved OpenAI’s ability to build additional capabilities, primarily for research and model training.”
This opened the door for OpenAI to work with Oracle.
Stargate is a joint venture organized as a new entity in which OpenAI has an equity stake, governance rights and operational control, a person familiar with the deal said. It will have a separate board appointed by the founding members and its CEO, this person said. The project will also have other investors including the UAE company MGX.
Microsoft, along with Nvidia and Arm, will be a “technology partner” in the new venture, but is not listed as an equity financier. SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son will be chairman of the entity’s board of directors, according to a statement from OpenAI posted on social media site X.
But Microsoft said it still retains the exclusive right to offer the OpenAI API, technology short for application programming interface, which is the main way software developers and business customers buy OpenAI services. This means that Oracle will not be able to host OpenAI’s primary revenue source.
Oracle did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Microsoft’s statements.
Microsoft said it has “revenue sharing agreements that flow both ways” with OpenAI.
“Key elements of our partnership remain in place for the duration of our contract through 2030, with our continued access to OpenAI IP, our revenue sharing arrangements and our exclusivity over OpenAI APIs,” Microsoft said.
Microsoft also said: “OpenAI recently made a major new commitment to Azure that will continue to support all OpenAI products as well as training,” referring to Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service.
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco and Crystal Ho in Davos, Switzerland; Editing by Christopher Cushing)
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