Microsoft has accumulated billions of dollars in "real money" pouring into OpenAI: with revenues reaching 30 billion dollars, the highest equity value soared to 228 billion dollars.

Microsoft Corporation (MSFT.US) has invested over $100 billion in its partnership with OpenAI, highlighting the important role this software maker plays in the growth of artificial intelligence companies. Witnesses on Monday stated that this figure includes Microsoft Corporation's original investment in OpenAI, as well as the costs of building infrastructure and hosting OpenAI's computing power. They stated that this figure is cumulative up to the end of this fiscal year (ending in June), with many costs being incurred before any revenue was received. "We needed to build the Azure infrastructure before providing these services to OpenAI," he said, referring to Microsoft Corporation's cloud computing division. The witnesses testified in a high-profile lawsuit in California's Oakland federal court where Elon Musk sued OpenAI and Microsoft Corporation. In the lawsuit filed in 2024, Musk accused OpenAI's co-founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, of betraying the nonprofit mission of the startup to benefit humanity, and instead operating it as a for-profit entity. The world's richest man also claimed that Microsoft Corporation assisted in this alleged betrayal. By early 2023, Microsoft Corporation had invested approximately $13 billion in OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, and had been its primary cloud infrastructure provider. Last week, Microsoft Corporation CEO Satya Nadella stated that the company aims to receive a return of $92 billion from its early significant investment in OpenAI. Nadella testified that these investments "worked well because we took risks." With such significant capital investment, the capital markets are reevaluating the capital efficiency and return on investment of tech giants like Microsoft Corporation. While building super-sized data centers has put pressure on Microsoft Corporation's free cash flow and profit margins in the short term, the commercial results have been greatly rewarding. Reportedly, Microsoft Corporation has successfully generated around $30 billion in robust revenues through businesses that deeply integrate OpenAI's technology, achieving a commercial cycle of "high investment for high growth." This undoubtedly injects a dose of optimism into Wall Street, which is currently under the shadow of the "AI bubble theory." What investors are particularly eyeing is that as OpenAI prepares for its initial public offering later in 2026, its latest market valuation has soared to around $852 billion from the trillion-dollar expectation. This means that, based on Microsoft Corporation's current 26.79% stake, the equity book value gained through "computing power equivalent investment" has swelled to between $135 billion and $228 billion. However, the exposure of this billion-dollar investment also comes with a significant reshuffling of the global AI cloud market landscape. Facing increasingly stringent antitrust scrutiny and high cost-sharing pressures, OpenAI and Microsoft Corporation recently restructured their partnership, officially ending the previous exclusive single bind. As a key step towards independent development, OpenAI then signed a diversified cloud service contract with Amazon.com, Inc. AWS worth $100 billion over 8 years. While this move significantly alleviates the downward pressure on Microsoft Corporation's stock price due to heavy asset construction, it also means that Microsoft Corporation has lost its absolute monopoly over the top AI technology. With the strong participation of Amazon.com Inc. AWS and Alphabet Inc. Class C Cloud, the AI cloud market has transitioned completely from the previous "exclusive binding" to a new stage of "multi-cloud and multi-polar" competition. In order to prevent the technological gap risks that may arise in the "post-OpenAI era," Microsoft Corporation has begun actively engaging with other AI startups to explore alternative scenarios, seeking to further reduce its absolute dependency on a single partner before the technology dividend fades. This has made the market share battle among the world's three cloud giants even more perplexing.