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 1,000 million dollars (921 million euros) in 2019 in OpenAI, which needs the financing and the 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 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 10,000 million dollars (9,210 million euros), raising the company’s valuation to about 29,000 million dollars (26,710 million euros).
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 1.2 billion dollars (1.109 million dollars). euros) in its accounts for the second fiscal quarter, which it will announce on January 24.
