Nadella: Microsoft has royalty-free access to OpenAI IP for seven years
Satya Nadella · All things AI w @altcap @sama & @satyanadella. A Halloween Special. 🎃🔥BG2 w/ Brad Gerstner · Bg2 Pod · Oct 31, 2025 · at 38:51
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella details the commercial terms and strategic value of Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI.
0:00 / 0:20exact quote · 20.9s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Not only we have the exclusivity of the model in Azure, but we have access to the IP. I mean, having a royalty free, let's even forgetting all the know how and the knowledge side of it, but having royalty free access all the way till seven more years gives us a lot of flexibility business model wise. It's kind of like having a frontier model for free.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Satya Nadella
Nadella: Microsoft refused OpenAI requests for dedicated multi-gigawatt compute clusters
“Sometimes you may have to say no to some of the demand, including some of the open AI demand, right? Because sometimes, you know, Sam may say, hey, build me a dedicated, you know, big, you know, whatever, multi-gigawatt data center in one location for training…”
Nadella: Business apps will collapse as AI agents replace business logic
“That's probably where they'll all collapse, right, in the agent era, because if you think about it, right, they are essentially CRUD databases with a bunch of business logic. The business logic is all going to these agents.”
Nadella: Traditional SaaS Apps Will Collapse into AI Agent Logic Tiers
“The SaaS applications, or biz apps, so let me just speak of our own dynamics thing. The approach, at least, we're taking is, I think the notion that business applications exist That's probably where they'll all collapse, right, in the agent era, because if you…”
Nadella confirms Microsoft owns approximately 27% of OpenAI on diluted basis
“Yeah, it does. But I would say before even our stake in it, Brad, I think what's pretty unique about OpenAI is the fact that as part of OpenAI's process of restructuring, one of the largest nonprofit gets created.”
Nadella: Microsoft's bottleneck is power and warm shells, not chip supply
“Quite frankly, the biggest issue we are now having is not a compute blood, but it's a power, and it's sort of the ability to get the bills done fast enough close to power. So if you can't do that, you may actually have a bunch of chips sitting in inventory tha…”
Nadella: Microsoft's $13.5B OpenAI investment was equity, not booked as Azure revenue
“Our investment of let's say that 13 and a half, which was all the training investment, that was not booked as revenue. That is the reason why we have the equity percentage. That's the reason why we have the 27% or a hundred and thirty-five billion. So that was…”