GoKawiilOpenAI revenue chief Denise Dresser said the AI company's agreement on Tuesday to make its models available on Amazon had nothing to do with an announcement a day earlier that the startup had restructured its relationship with Microsoft for a second time in six months.
"The two are not related in any way," Dresser told CNBC in an interview following OpenAI's announcement with Amazon.
Analysts aren't so sure.
A lot has happened since late October, when OpenAI completed its recapitalization, giving Microsoft a 27% stake in the for-profit side of the artificial intelligence company. As part of that arrangement, OpenAI agreed to purchase an incremental $250 billion of Azure services. And a revenue share agreement would remain until OpenAI was verified by an independent panel to have reached artificial general intelligence, or AGI.
One major development since then is that OpenAI has been cozying up to Amazon, Microsoft's biggest rival in cloud infrastructure.
In November, OpenAI disclosed a $38 billion commitment with Amazon Web Services. And in late February, Amazon said it would invest $50 billion in OpenAI, which would, in turn, use 2 gigawatts worth of AWS' custom Trainium chips for training AI models.
Amazon and OpenAI also agreed at the time to jointly develop "customized models" for Amazon's engineering teams to power its consumer products, and OpenAI's spending commitment on AWS expanded by $100 billion.
"That was the big thing that was happening," said RBC Capital Markets analyst Rishi Jaluria, who recommends buying Microsoft shares, in an interview.
This week's one-two punch is the starkest sign yet that a dramatic shift is underway in the decade-long relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI.
It started in 2016, when OpenAI began running its big experiments on Azure. Three years later, Microsoft invested its first $1 billion in OpenAI, a number that would grow to $13 billion over several follow-on rounds.