OpenAI-Amazon Deal: Microsoft's AI Grip Unchanged

OpenAI has announced an OpenAI Amazon strategic partnership, a move that provides the AI leader with additional compute capacity. The collaboration, revealed on February 27, 2026, allows OpenAI to leverage Amazon's infrastructure for its scaling needs, including large-scale initiatives like the Stargate project.

However, Microsoft, OpenAI's long-standing primary partner, was quick to issue a joint statement clarifying that this new collaboration does not alter the fundamental terms of their existing relationship. Microsoft reaffirmed its exclusive license and access to OpenAI's intellectual property and models, maintaining its deep technical integration across research, engineering, and product development.

Crucially, Microsoft stated that its commercial and revenue-share arrangement with OpenAI remains unchanged. This includes revenue generated from partnerships with other cloud providers. Furthermore, Microsoft maintains Azure's exclusive role as cloud provider for stateless OpenAI APIs. Any stateless API calls to OpenAI models, even those stemming from the Amazon partnership, will continue to be hosted on Azure, leveraging its global infrastructure and enterprise-grade capabilities.

The statement underscores that such collaborations were always contemplated within the scope of their original agreements. OpenAI's first-party products, including Frontier, will also continue to operate on Azure. The contractual definition of AGI and its determination process between Microsoft and OpenAI are also unaffected.