How so? As far as I can tell, Microsoft has a large equity interest in OpenAI, and OpenAI has a lot of cloud credits usable on Microsoft’s cloud. I don’t think those credits are transferable to other providers.
The value in the proposition is OpenAI IP. Money and data centers are commodities easily replaced, especially when you hold the IP everyone wants a piece of.
The arrangement is mutually beneficial, but the owner of the IP holds the cards.
But how many of them have hot data centers to offer? Google is a direct competitor, so Oracle or Amazon are kinda the only other two big options to offer them what MS is right now.
If MS drops OpenAI, it's not like they can just seamlessly pivot to running their own data centers with no downtime, even with pretty high investment.
A relationship that’s mutually beneficial needn’t be symmetric. Microsoft’s relationship is fairly commoditized - money and GPUs. OpenAI controls the IP that matters.
I’d note that the supplier of GPUs is Nvidia, who also offers cloud GPU services and doesn’t have a stake in the GCP, Azure, AWS behemoth battle. I’d actually see that as a more natural less middle man relationship.
The real value azure brings is enterprise compliance chops. However IMO aws bedrock seems to be a more successful enterprise integration point. But they’re all commodity products and don’t provide the value OpenAI provides to the relationships.