I don’t know if you caught yesterday’s Bloomberg piece on Microsoft and its OpenAI partnership, but it looks like M$ just pulled one of the most counterintuitive moves in recent AI history — and that’s being generous.
The obvious question
Let me get this straight, dear Microsoft… over the past few years you have:
- poured billions of dollars into OpenAI
- built Copilot, Azure AI, and a significant chunk of your entire strategy on top of GPT
- helped turn OpenAI into the de facto reference point for the whole market
And now you’re having second thoughts and letting OpenAI freely source computing power from other hyperscalers — including AWS and Google Cloud, which happen to be your direct competitors — potentially turbocharging the growth of an entity that sits at the very core of your AI stack, only to then watch it cosy up to the competition where you have zero control?
The monopoly playbook
This is at least peculiar, because in hyperscale logic — think Facebook, Instagram, TikTok — the competitive advantage comes from hitting critical mass for profitability before everyone else, locking in a de facto monopoly and controlling the ecosystem.
So what’s going on? Microsoft, the textbook digital monopolist, the great corporate villain, suddenly decides to play the good Samaritan?
The key detail
There’s one key detail in all of this that most people are glossing over. Do you know what it is?
Did Microsoft just make a brilliant strategic move? Or the single biggest self-inflicted wound of the decade?