By Jay Peters, Jun 12, 2024, 9:46 PM GMT+1

OpenAI and Microsoft are teaming up with Oracle to get more compute capacity to run ChatGPT. As part of a partnership announced this week, the three companies are working together so that OpenAI can use the Microsoft Azure Al platform on Oracle’s infrastructure.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman hasn’t shied away from the fact that his company needs substantially more infrastructure to power its services. He has even been in discussions to raise billions of dollars for an AI chip venture. In the press release for the Oracle deal this week, he said Oracle’s chips will “enable OpenAI to continue to scale.”

To date, OpenAI has relied fully on Microsoft for its compute needs. In turn, Microsoft has invested $13 billion for a 49 percent stake in OpenAI’s for-profit subsidiary and the exclusive right to commercially license its technology. But as this Oracle deal makes clear, OpenAI needs more compute than Microsoft alone can give if it wants to keep up with demand and prevent future ChatGPT outages.

Microsoft and OpenAI are clearly sensitive about how this Oracle deal is perceived. On Wednesday, OpenAI issued a follow-up statement saying that “our strategic cloud relationship with Microsoft is unchanged” and that the new partnership “enables OpenAI to use the Azure AI platform on OCI infrastructure for inference and other needs.” (Inference refers to the act of running AI models in production through applications like ChatGPT.)

OpenAI also made clear that the pre-training of its frontier models “continues to happen on supercomputers built in partnership with Microsoft.”

There’s another level of awkwardness to OpenAI and Oracle working together: Oracle also provides infrastructure to xAI, Elon Musk’s OpenAI rival.

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Jay Peters

News Editor

Jay Peters is a News Editor at The Verge. He covers breaking news in consumer technology, social media, video games, virtual worlds, streaming, and more. He’s appeared on CNBC, NPR, BBC News, WNYC, and other broadcast outlets to discuss technology news.

Before joining The Verge as a News Writer in 2019, Jay worked for Techmeme, where he helped curate the most important technology news of the moment. He actually started his career in technology public relations, working in the field for more than five years. He graduated from the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication.

When he’s not writing, Jay really likes running. But he prefers to run far, not fast.