Microsoft recorded $10 billion in revenue from OpenAI
TechCrunch Rebecca Bellan ● Covered by 3 sources
Microsoft said it made $10B from OpenAI deals last quarter. That’s nearly 11% of revenue, even as the two companies also compete for customers.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Rebecca Bellan — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
Microsoft says OpenAI is now a huge source of money, not just a strategic bet. In the quarter ended September 30, the company booked $10 billion in revenue tied to commercial arrangements with OpenAI, including revenue-sharing payments. That was nearly 11% of Microsoft’s total quarterly revenue of $92.3 billion.
The scale got even bigger over the full fiscal year. Microsoft said revenue from OpenAI reached $24.1 billion in fiscal 2026, and at the latest quarterly pace that would work out to about $40 billion a year. For a partnership that’s now loosening at the edges, the financial dependence still looks remarkably tight.
There’s another number that matters: Microsoft said OpenAI owed it $7.2 billion in outstanding receivables at the end of September, up from $6 billion at the end of June. That isn’t new revenue. It’s money Microsoft says it is still owed for earlier transactions.
Microsoft did not break out how much of the OpenAI-related revenue came from revenue sharing versus Azure cloud services, and that leaves the real mix a bit murky. TechCrunch has previously reported, based on leaked documents, that Microsoft received $865.8 million in net revenue-sharing payments from OpenAI in the first nine months of 2025. The broader relationship has also been changing: the companies began loosening their once-exclusive setup in October 2025, OpenAI agreed in an April 2026 deal to keep sharing revenue through 2030 subject to a cap, and Microsoft’s ownership stake slipped from about 25% in June to 24% in September, down from roughly 27% after the October 2025 recapitalization.
Even with OpenAI now free to work with competing cloud providers, Microsoft still has a big financial lever in the relationship. OpenAI also committed to buy an additional $250 billion in Azure services under the October 2025 agreement. So yes, the partnership is less exclusive. It is not less expensive.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is what vendor lock-in looks like when it wears a blazer and talks about “partnership.” Microsoft gets to call OpenAI a collaborator while collecting a very large bill from the same relationship. The AI industry keeps pretending these deals are cleanly separate from competition, and that’s mostly corporate fan fiction.
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