OpenAI and Microsoft are working with Oracle to obtain more computing power to run ChatGPT. As part of the partnership announced this week, the three companies are working together so that OpenAI can use the Microsoft Azure AI platform on Oracle infrastructure.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman doesn’t shy away from the fact that his company needs more infrastructure to support its services. He is even discussing raising billions of dollars for an artificial intelligence chip company. In a press release about the Oracle deal this week, he said Oracle’s chips will “enable OpenAI to continue to scale.”
To date, OpenAI has relied entirely on Microsoft for its computing needs. In turn, Microsoft invested $13 billion for a 49% stake in OpenAI’s for-profit subsidiary, as well as exclusive rights to commercially license its technology. But as the Oracle deal illustrates, if OpenAI wants to keep up with demand and prevent future ChatGPT outages, it will need more computing power than Microsoft can provide alone.
Microsoft and OpenAI are obviously very sensitive to how people view the Oracle deal. On Wednesday, OpenAI issued a follow-up statement, saying “our strategic cloud relationship with Microsoft has not changed” and that the new partnership “enables OpenAI to use the Azure AI platform on OCI infrastructure for inference and other needs.” ( Inference is the act of running artificial intelligence models in production through applications such as ChatGPT).
OpenAI also made it clear that pre-training of its cutting-edge models “continues to be performed on supercomputers built in partnership with Microsoft.”
