Signs emerged in the trial involving Elon Musk and Sam Altman that Microsoft was concerned even before the launch of ChatGPT that it could hand control to OpenAI.

On May 13 local time, CNBC reported that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote in an email to executives in April 2022, "I don't want to be IBM and have OpenAI be Microsoft."

Nadella appears to have had in mind the past when IBM ceded the initiative to Microsoft, which supplied the operating system. Microsoft first invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019 and sought to secure intellectual property rights through early contracts, not just provide Azure cloud services.

In court, Nadella said it had become more critical and important to have real control at every layer of the stack. He also explained that securing intellectual property rights was very important because Microsoft teamed up with OpenAI in exchange for giving up opportunities for in-house development.

OpenAI later grew to a valuation of $850 billion and partnered not only with Microsoft but also with Google, Oracle and Amazon. In April, the two companies revised their contract again, capping the revenue share OpenAI pays Microsoft and allowing OpenAI to provide all products to customers through other providers, including Amazon and Google.

OpenAI remains a core pillar of Microsoft's cloud business. As of the end of 2025, about 45 percent of Microsoft's commercial remaining performance obligations were linked to OpenAI, and the company is expanding data centres accordingly. Michael Wechter, a Microsoft executive in charge of corporate development, told the court that OpenAI-related spending, including investment commitments, infrastructure and hosting costs, would exceed $100 billion by June 2026.

Microsoft has also strengthened its AI infrastructure capabilities by working with OpenAI. Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott testified that the first supercomputer built with OpenAI was a system that bundled 10,000 GPUs over about six months. Nadella also said the collaboration gave Microsoft know-how to build AI supercomputers.

Microsoft is no longer in a position to provide OpenAI technology to customers on a virtually exclusive basis. Since 2024 it has publicly recognised OpenAI as a competitor, and it has also partnered with other AI model developers such as xAI and Anthropic to offer those models through Azure. At the same time, it is developing its own models. But no Microsoft software product has yet produced a blockbuster on the scale of ChatGPT.

Nadella said Microsoft gave up some rights in its initial contract because it responded flexibly to allow OpenAI to keep expanding and growing, adding that remaining a good partner and platform company is core to the company.