Leaked Documents Reveal How Much OpenAI Paid to Microsoft

Leaked internal documents have shed new light on the massive financial scale of the partnership between OpenAI and its biggest backer, Microsoft. The documents, which surfaced in a recent report, detail the colossal sums OpenAI pays Microsoft for the cloud computing power required to train and run its advanced artificial intelligence models.

While Microsoft has famously invested over $13 billion into OpenAI, the leaked figures show that a significant portion of that investment is immediately routed back to Microsoft in the form of cloud service payments, creating a powerful, symbiotic financial loop.

A Multi-Billion Dollar Cloud Bill
According to the leaked information, OpenAI's spending on Microsoft's Azure cloud infrastructure is staggering, cementing it as one of the largest cloud customers in the world.

The documents reportedly indicate that OpenAI's spending on Azure is not just a simple bill, but a complex arrangement tied to the company's aggressive development roadmap. Some reports suggest that OpenAI's daily operational "burn rate" for cloud computing runs into the millions of dollars.

While precise, up-to-the-minute figures are not public, the leaked data reinforces analyst estimates that OpenAI is on track to pay Microsoft billions of dollars annually for access to the vast number of specialized GPUs and high-performance computing clusters necessary to train models like GPT-4 and its successors.

The "Compute-for-Equity" Loop
The leaked details provide a clearer picture of the strategic genius behind Microsoft's investment. Instead of just handing over cash, Microsoft provided a significant portion of its investment in the form of Azure cloud credits.

This "compute-for-equity" deal means:

Guaranteed Revenue for Microsoft: OpenAI gets the massive computing power it desperately needs, and Microsoft gets a guaranteed, multi-billion dollar customer for its Azure cloud platform, dramatically boosting its own revenue and market share in the AI infrastructure race.

A Strategic Moat: The deal effectively locks OpenAI into the Azure ecosystem, making Microsoft the indispensable infrastructure partner for the world's leading AI company.

Fueling the AI Arms Race: The figures show the astronomical cost of competing at the cutting edge of AI. The multi-billion dollar price tag for cloud services highlights the immense barrier to entry, explaining why only a handful of tech giants can afford to build foundational models.

The leaked documents confirm what many in the industry suspected: the partnership between OpenAI and Microsoft is one of the most financially intertwined and strategically critical alliances in modern technology, with billions of dollars flowing in both directions to fuel the AI revolution.