While companies like Apple and Google are racing to build their own AI models, Microsoft took a different approach. Why reinvent the wheel when someone else already made a perfectly good one, right? To that end, Microsoft teamed up with OpenAI, and it looks like, according to the Q4 2025 earnings report, that partnership is paying off in the billions .
Microsoft earning billions from OpenAI partnership in Q4 2025
According to the company’s latest quarterly earnings report , Microsoft gained billions in net income for the second quarter of fiscal year 2026 from its OpenAI partnership. To be more specific, we’re looking at $7.6 billion. That’s a massive jump, especially considering Microsoft took a $3.1 billion hit from the same investment just a few quarters ago. So what changed? This was thanks to OpenAI’s restructuring into a public benefit corporation, which led Microsoft to renegotiate terms and lock in a huge Azure cloud commitment.
OpenAI agreed to purchase an additional $250 billion worth of Azure services. That commitment alone pushed Microsoft’s commercial remaining performance obligations to $625 billion, with 45% of that total coming from OpenAI. Considering that Microsoft has invested more than $13 billion , they’re almost halfway to making their money back.
But OpenAI isn’t the only company Microsoft has invested in. Back in November 2025, the Redmond company revealed it is also investing in Anthropic to the tune of $5 billion. In return, Anthropic is expected to buy $30 billion of Azure compute capacity.
Adopting the Microsoft play
Microsoft’s strategy was smart. Rather than spend billions building their own models from scratch, in which there is no guarantee it would pan out the way they hope, why not let someone else do the job? OpenAI and Anthropic are big names in the AI space, and Microsoft investing in them is a clever play.
In fact, we’re seeing others follow a similar path. Apple had initially attempted to go about its AI efforts themselves. But we all know how that turned out . Now, Apple has signed a deal with Google to license its Gemini model. While we’re still waiting to see how that plays out, given Gemini’s proven capabilities, it should be a whole sight better than Apple Intelligence.
