The American technology giant Microsoft has confirmed on Monday a multi-year “billion dollar” investment corresponding to the third phase of its long-term partnership with OpenAI to accelerate advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and ensure that these benefits are shared. widely with the world, as announced by the multinational.
This agreement follows previous investments in 2019 and 2021 and extends the collaboration between both companies across AI research and supercomputing, allowing each to independently commercialize the resulting advanced AI technologies.
Microsoft invested $1 billion in 2019 in OpenAI, which needs the funding and power of Microsoft cloud computing to process large volumes of data and run the increasingly complex models of DALL-E and ChatGPT.
“We formed our partnership with OpenAI around a shared ambition to responsibly advance cutting-edge AI research and democratize AI as a new technology platform,” said Satya Nadella, Microsoft President and CEO.
“In this next phase of our partnership, developers and organizations across all industries will have access to the best AI infrastructure, models, and toolchains with Azure to build and run their applications,” he added.
As published by the US press in early January, Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI would reach US$10 billion, raising the company’s valuation to around US$29 billion.
Last week, Microsoft announced a series of measures in response to macroeconomic conditions, including cutting some 10,000 jobs, just under 5% of its workforce, assuming an extraordinary adverse impact of US$1.2 billion on its accounts for the second fiscal quarter, which will be released on January 24.