Microsoft collected about $10 billion in revenue tied to OpenAI during the quarter that ended Sept. 30, a regulatory filing reported last month shows, underscoring how central the ChatGPT maker has become to Microsoft's results even as the two companies increasingly compete for the same enterprise customers. The figure, first detailed by TechCrunch's review of the filing, works out to roughly 11% of Microsoft's $92.3 billion in total revenue for the quarter, the first of its 2027 fiscal year.
The filing does not break out how much of the $10 billion came from Azure cloud-computing fees paid by OpenAI versus revenue-sharing payments under the companies' commercial agreement, and Microsoft has not clarified the split publicly. For the full fiscal 2026 year, Microsoft reported $24.1 billion in OpenAI-related revenue, implying the most recent quarter's pace would put the relationship on track for roughly $40 billion annualized if it continues at that rate. Microsoft also disclosed that OpenAI owed it $7.2 billion in outstanding receivables as of the end of September, up from $6 billion three months earlier — money owed for past transactions rather than new revenue, according to an analysis of the disclosure.
A shifting, and shrinking, stake
The numbers reflect a relationship that has shifted considerably over the past year. Microsoft has invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI since 2019, and in October 2025 it gave up its exclusive hold on hosting OpenAI's models in exchange for a commitment from OpenAI to buy an additional $250 billion of Azure services. OpenAI is widely reported to share roughly 20% of its revenue with Microsoft under that arrangement, though neither company has confirmed the figure on the record. Microsoft's ownership stake in OpenAI has meanwhile drifted down, from about 27% just after last October's restructuring to roughly 24% as of September, a dilution Microsoft has not explained.
The disclosure lands at a moment of growing scrutiny of circular financial arrangements across the AI industry, in which the same handful of companies invest in each other, buy each other's cloud capacity and count the proceeds as revenue. Microsoft's filing gives one of the clearest numerical snapshots yet of how much of its own growth is now bound up with a single customer that is simultaneously one of its largest investments and, through products like Copilot and Azure AI Foundry, a direct competitor for the same corporate customers. Microsoft has not said whether it expects the relationship's revenue share to grow, shrink or plateau as OpenAI diversifies its cloud spending beyond Azure under the terms of last year's deal.
