During testimony in the ongoing Elon Musk vs. OpenAI case, Microsoft executive Michael Wetter revealed that the company has spent more than $100 billion on its partnership with OpenAI to date, including direct investments, Azure infrastructure, and hosting costs for AI models like ChatGPT. The spending has surged since Microsoft’s initial $1 billion investment in 2019, with the company later committing around $13 billion more to OpenAI.
Michael Wetter, who has worked on Microsoft’s OpenAI deal structures and corporate development negotiations, said the $100 billion figure is not limited to equity investments. It also includes years of operational costs associated with training and running OpenAI’s increasingly powerful models on Microsoft Azure. The company effectively became the computing backbone of OpenAI after signing an exclusive cloud partnership in 2019. Wetter further told the court that the amount of money Microsoft had made with OpenAI stood at nearly $9.5 billion by March 2025. He also added that the company never spoke to Elon Musk while evaluating its investment in OpenAI.
The partnership originally began on a much smaller scale. In 2019, Microsoft invested $1 billion into OpenAI, a startup that at the time was still primarily viewed as a research-focused AI lab. Internal emails and court exhibits now emerging during the Musk trial show that many Microsoft executives were initially doubtful about the deal. According to court documents, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott worried that OpenAI could eventually move its business to Amazon Web Services and criticize Azure publicly if Microsoft failed to support it aggressively enough. Jason Zander, then leading Azure engineering, reportedly questioned whether OpenAI’s AI gaming projects like the Dota 2 bot were commercially meaningful enough to warrant huge infrastructure commitments.
But despite internal hesitation, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella pushed forward with the partnership because the company believed OpenAI could help Azure establish leadership in advanced AI computing before rivals like Google gained dominance. Even on May 11, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called the company’s OpenAI investment a ‘calculated risk’ during federal court testimony.
Also, Satya Nadella strongly rejected Musk’s claims during testimony. He argued that Microsoft’s investments were strategic commercial deals, not charitable donations, and said Musk never directly objected to Microsoft’s involvement during the early years of the partnership. Nadella also defended the Sam Altman-led firm’s move toward a for-profit structure, arguing that building frontier AI systems requires huge amounts of capital and infrastructure investment.
All this is happening at a time when Microsoft reportedly projected around $92 billion in gains from its OpenAI investment, potentially raising the value of its position to about $135 billion. Microsoft and OpenAI have also recently revised their commercial agreement, including a revenue-sharing structure capped at around $38 billion through 2030.
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Ashutosh is a Senior Writer at The Tech Portal, largely reporting on new tech, and intersection of technology and business. Ashutosh’s career spans across nearly a decade of technology writing across multiple platforms and languages.
