Microsoft has invested $13 billion in OpenAI so far

Microsoft has invested $13 billion in OpenAI so far

San Francisco, 3/16/2023

According to Bloomberg, Microsoft has spent hundreds of millions of dollars building a supercomputer to power OpenAI projects like ChatGPT. The supercomputer connected tens of thousands of Nvidia A100 graphics cards to Microsoft Azure to allow OpenAI to train its AI models.

The system architecture is reliable and operational „at a very large scale,“ which led to ChatGPT and other AI models, said Nidhi Chappell, general manager of Azure AI infrastructure at Microsoft.

While ChatGPT is perhaps the most well-known model of the system, the supercomputer was built to be generalized so anyone can train large language models, according to Microsoft EVP Scott Guthrie.

Overall, the project cost several hundred million dollars. To date, Microsoft has invested over $13 billion in total in OpenAI, including a $10 billion investment announced in January.

Since 2019, Microsoft has been the exclusive cloud partner for OpenAI, and its Azure-based supercomputing system has been used to train all of OpenAI’s machine learning and AI models.

According to Guthrie, Microsoft is now working on a next-generation supercomputer that „is a lot bigger and will allow for even more sophistication.“

Meanwhile, Microsoft is hosting an event this Thursday, March 16th called „The Future of Work: Reinventing Productivity with AI.“

The hosts, CEO Satya Nadella and Microsoft 365 leader Jared Spataro, aim to show viewers „how AI will enable a whole new way of working for every person and every company“.

In this regard, Microsoft recently announced a „Copilot“ version of its business management platform Dynamics 365, aimed at automating some customer service, marketing and sales tasks.

Dynamics 365 Copilot, described as an AI assistant, includes OpenAI technology to automate tasks such as Such as writing email replies, composing chat and email replies, and creating email summaries or teams meetings in Outlook.