Microsoft’s AI Revenue Mostly Comes From OpenAI
Trending Topics Jakob Steinschaden
Microsoft's AI business leans hard on OpenAI, new filings show. $24.1B of its AI revenue last year came from that one partner alone.
Microsoft finally put some real numbers behind a question investors have been asking for months: how much of its AI hype actually comes from OpenAI versus everything else. The answer, buried in a filing last week, is a lot. Microsoft booked $24.1 billion in revenue from OpenAI during the fiscal year that ended in June. That's not pocket change, even for a company Microsoft's size.
Here's where it gets interesting. Back in March, CEO Satya Nadella said Microsoft was tracking toward $37 billion in annual AI revenue. But when Microsoft reported its fiscal Q4 earnings, that total AI figure quietly disappeared from the update. No fresh number, no explanation. Bloomberg did the math anyway, assuming the 123% annualized growth rate from March held steady, and landed on roughly $34 billion in total AI revenue for the year. Stack that against the $24.1 billion from OpenAI alone, and you get a partner that's carrying somewhere around 70% of Microsoft's entire AI business.
The money isn't one-directional, either. OpenAI pays Microsoft for compute, for training costs, and hands over a revenue share on top. Microsoft, in turn, owns roughly 27% of OpenAI and has been its biggest backer since the early days. Yet the relationship has gotten messier than either side probably intended. The original plan — team up to knock Google off its search throne — never really happened. And OpenAI has since gone shopping elsewhere, signing deals with Amazon among others, while Microsoft has hedged its own bets by backing Anthropic and building in-house models beyond GPT.
Zoom out far enough and OpenAI's contribution shrinks fast. Against Microsoft's total revenue, it's under 10%. The company pulled in about $51 billion in new commercial bookings last quarter, and most of that came from customers with nothing to do with AI startups. Still, OpenAI drove the bulk of the year-over-year growth in those bookings, which is the part that should make shareholders pay attention. Microsoft's AI story looks diversified from thirty thousand feet. Get closer, and it's still mostly one very large, very unpredictable tenant.
My take
Microsoft loves to talk about AI diversification while one customer quietly accounts for most of the growth everyone's cheering about. That's not a partnership anymore, it's a dependency with better PR, and the sudden disappearance of the total AI revenue figure from the latest earnings call looks less like an oversight and more like a company that doesn't want anyone doing this exact math.
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