OpenAI Partners with Google Cloud for Scaling Up ChatGPT Services
In a strategic move announced on Wednesday, OpenAI, the pioneering artificial intelligence (AI) research laboratory, revealed its intention to leverage Google Cloud’s infrastructure for its flagship AI assistant, ChatGPT. This expansion aims to address the burgeoning demand for increased computing power, following an initial reliance on Microsoft for cloud capacity.
The evolving relationship between the two tech giants has been marked by shifts in competitive landscapes, with Microsoft designating OpenAI as a competitor last year. Both companies offer AI tools for developers and subscriptions to corporations.
In expanding its supplier base, OpenAI will integrate Google Cloud Platform alongside existing partners such as Microsoft, CoreWeave, and Oracle, to support ChatGPT and its application programming interface (API).
This partnership serves as a significant victory for Google, bolstering its cloud unit, which is comparatively younger and smaller than those of Amazon and Microsoft. Google also maintains a cloud business relationship with Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI executives.
The Google infrastructure will be operational in the United States, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, and the United Kingdom. Last year, Oracle announced a partnership with Microsoft and OpenAI to extend the Azure AI platform to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, providing additional computing power for OpenAI. In March, OpenAI sealed a five-year deal worth nearly $12 billion with CoreWeave.
Microsoft previously agreed in January to adopt a model of providing first refusal rights for any additional computing resources required by OpenAI, rather than serving as an exclusive vendor. Microsoft continues to hold the exclusive rights to OpenAI’s programming interfaces.
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s co-founder and CEO, acknowledged capacity constraints faced by the startup in April, stating that they rely on Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) to power their large language models. In a post at the time, he appealed for any available GPU capacity in 100k chunks.
In June, Reuters reported that OpenAI was planning to secure additional cloud capacity from Google.
The growth of ChatGPT has remained unabated and appears poised to persist, according to Apoorv Agrawal, partner at Altimeter.
