Microsoft Dumps OpenAI: The End of the $13B Partnership

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman made it official this week: the company is done relying on OpenAI. In a Financial Times interview, the DeepMind co-founder confirmed what industry observers had suspected for months. Microsoft is racing toward true AI self-sufficiency, developing its own frontier foundation models.The announcement marks a decisive shift in the $13 billion partnership that transformed both companies. What began as an exclusive alliance has evolved into a competitive arms race where both parties are now building toward the same goal: artificial general intelligence.Suleyman's comments come four months after Microsoft and OpenAI restructured their partnership in October 2025. That deal converted Microsoft's profit-sharing rights into a 27% ownership stake in the newly formed OpenAI Group PBC.Microsoft's self-sufficiency push is not aspirational. The company has already invested billions in the infrastructure required to train and run frontier models. In January, Microsoft introduced Maia 200, its second-generation AI accelerator chip. The company is also building the Fairwater network of AI data centers.Microsoft previewed MAI-1-preview in August 2025, an in-house mixture-of-experts model pre-trained on approximately 15,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs. The company plans to integrate MAI models into certain Copilot text use cases.