OpenAI struck a five-year, $11.9 billion agreement with cloud provider CoreWeave, taking a direct $350 million equity stake and possibly deepening tensions with its biggest backer, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), in what TechCrunch described as a “grandmaster-level chess move.”
“CoreWeave is an important addition to OpenAI’s infrastructure portfolio, complementing our commercial deals with Microsoft and Oracle, and our joint venture with SoftBank on Stargate,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement.
But also, Microsoft is CoreWeave’s largest customer, with the company accounting for 62% of the New Jersey-based AI startup’s $1.9 billion revenue in 2024. Thus, this arrangement makes OpenAI both customer and partial owner of a company that Microsoft relies on for its AI infrastructure.
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The deal also requires CoreWeave “to provide dedicated compute capacity for OpenAI’s model training and services.” Altman may have pulled a fast one.
Microsoft invested billions in OpenAI and receives a portion of OpenAI’s revenue, but the relationship has deteriorated as both companies increasingly compete for enterprise customers. In January, OpenAI ended Microsoft’s exclusivity as its cloud provider through the Stargate AI infrastructure deal with SoftBank and Oracle.
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Microsoft has responded by developing its own competing AI “reasoning” models under the MAI family and hiring Altman’s rival, Mustafa Suleyman, to lead its AI division.
Altman complained last week that OpenAI is “out of GPUs,” a problem this deal helps address while potentially complicating Microsoft’s relationship with a critical supplier.
CoreWeave, which operates 32 data centers with over 250,000 Nvidia GPUs, filed for an IPO last week seeking to raise more than $4 billion. The OpenAI deal strengthens its position by diversifying its customer base before going public.
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