As part of its plan to solve its chip problem, Microsoft is allowing OpenAI to take the lead. According to Bloomberg, Microsoft will leverage OpenAI’s custom chip designs to strengthen its semiconductor efforts, which have lagged behind competitors like Google and Amazon.
The deal is fairly straightforward: OpenAI, in collaboration with Broadcom, designs AI chips, and Microsoft gets full access to these innovations. CEO Satya Nadella said in a recent interview, “As they innovate at the system level, we gain access to all of it.” He explained that Microsoft plans to adopt OpenAI’s designs and then scale them for its own purposes.
Under the updated partnership agreement, Microsoft has secured intellectual property rights to OpenAI’s chip designs while also maintaining access to the company’s AI models through 2032. The only exception outside this agreement is OpenAI’s consumer hardware that the ChatGPT creator wants to independently develop and sell.
This collaboration highlights a broader reality in the tech industry: creating cutting-edge AI chips is an extremely complex and expensive process. Rather than trying to tackle it alone, Microsoft hopes that OpenAI’s expertise, combined with a well-structured agreement, will accelerate its ambitions.
