Inside why Bill Gates expected Microsoft to burn $1B on OpenAI — and how the bet paid off far beyond that

In 2024, a report claimed that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is still intimately involved in the company's affairs despite stepping down from the board to focus on philanthropy. It further revealed that the executive's word is treated as the gospel and that he played a crucial role in fostering Microsoft and OpenAI's partnership.

Interestingly, a separate report revealed that Bill Gates was initially skeptical about Microsoft investing $1 billion in OpenAI, primarily because of its non-profit structure. "You're going to burn this billion dollars," warned Gates.

But as it now seems, Gates was wrong. A new report by The Information revealed that Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI has generated approximately $30 billion in revenue for the former between 2023 and 2025 based on the tech giant's corporate documents and internal material, which is more than twice its investment ($13 billion) in the AI firm.

For context, most of this revenue comes from OpenAI's infrastructure needs, with reports suggesting that the ChatGPT maker spent up to $23 billion between 2023 and 2025 to rent out Microsoft’s Azure servers. The rest of the revenue comes from AI-powered products and services, such as Office 365 Copilot and GitHub Copilot.

That said, the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership has evolved significantly over the past year, first signing a new definitive agreement in October 2025 that will allow OpenAI to sever its ties with Microsoft only after an independent body verifies that the AI firm has indeed achieved artificial general intelligence (AGI).

As OpenAI evolved into a for-profit entity to secure more funding from investors, Microsoft now holds a 27% stake, translating to approximately $135 billion.

The partnership also recently turned non-exclusive. This means Microsoft will no longer need to pay OpenAI a revenue share. The new deal capped OpenAI's revenue-sharing payments at $38 billion through 2030, saving it approximately $97 billion when compared to the terms in the original agreement.

It's worth noting that tech giant remains OpenAI’s primary cloud partner and its products will ship on Azure first. However, the ChatGPT maker can still provide all its products to customers across any cloud provider if it fails or chooses not to support the necessary capabilities.

Microsoft's partnership seems fractured

It's no secret that there's been a bit of tension between Microsoft and OpenAI. Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI, citing that the company defrauded him out of millions of dollars by using a fake humanitarian mission with Microsoft's help, doesn't make things better.

Microsoft has been taking elaborate measures, seemingly emancipating itself from an over-reliance on OpenAI for its technologies, including developing its own in-house frontier AI models.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff predicted that Microsoft would not use OpenAI in the future, shortly after the company announced its now-cancelled $500 billion Stargate project, which was designed to construct data centers across the United States to meet its computing power needs.

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