Leaked Documents Expose OpenAI's Massive Cloud Costs to Microsoft

2 hours ago7 min read

A trove of confidential documents has exposed the immense financial engine behind the AI boom, detailing the massive payments OpenAI makes to its key partner, Microsoft, for cloud computing services. The revelations provide the first concrete look into the staggering operational costs of running services like ChatGPT, moving beyond speculation to hard financial data.The documents outline a revenue-share agreement between the companies and, more significantly, reveal the enormous 'inference costs'—the ongoing expense of processing millions of daily user queries through trained AI models. While training advanced models like GPT-4 is known to cost over $100 million, these leaks highlight that the continuous inference costs represent a perpetual financial burn rate that dominates OpenAI's operational expenses.This challenges the perception of AI as a near-zero-margin technology, instead revealing it as a resource-intensive operation where each chatbot interaction carries a substantial computational price tag. The partnership with Microsoft appears deeply financialized: Microsoft's Azure cloud provides the essential infrastructure—tens of thousands of specialized Nvidia GPUs—while receiving significant payments and profit-sharing from OpenAI's services.This dynamic raises critical questions about competition in the AI sector, suggesting that only cloud hyperscalers like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon may have the capital resources to compete at the highest level. The disclosures also intensify scrutiny of OpenAI's unique corporate structure, balancing its non-profit origins with the profit demands of its capped-profit entity.Furthermore, the leaked cost figures fuel the ongoing debate between open-source and closed-source AI development, providing concrete evidence of the immense expense behind OpenAI's approach. These financial revelations will likely influence investment strategies, regulatory discussions about compute resources, and the strategic planning of AI companies worldwide, grounding the lofty promises of artificial intelligence in the stark reality of infrastructure costs and electricity bills.

#OpenAI

#Microsoft

#revenue share

#inference costs

#financial agreement

#enterprise AI

#hottest news

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