OpenAI and Microsoft Cap Revenue-Sharing at $38 Billion, Clearing the Runway to an IPO

OpenAI and Microsoft have agreed to cap the lab's long-running revenue-sharing arrangement at $38 billion, ending an open-ended commitment that some analysts had projected could exceed $135 billion over the life of the partnership. The Information first reported the cap on Monday, and it has since been confirmed in filings circulated to OpenAI investors. The new ceiling is tied to OpenAI's overall revenue and remains in force through 2030, but unlike the prior structure it no longer scales indefinitely with growth.

The change is the latest in a sweeping rework of the OpenAI–Microsoft relationship that began in late April, when the two companies introduced what they described as a more flexible commercial framework. The amended deal lets OpenAI distribute its products across competing cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, while preserving Microsoft's status as primary cloud partner. Under the new terms, OpenAI products still ship first on Azure unless Microsoft cannot or chooses not to support the necessary capabilities — a carve-out that has already been invoked for several frontier training runs.

For OpenAI, the cap is widely read inside the company as the missing piece of an IPO story that executives have been quietly stitching together for months. With a hard ceiling on Microsoft payments, the lab can show prospective public-market investors a cleaner path to profitability and a more predictable cost of revenue. Several people familiar with the discussions say leadership now believes a listing could land as early as the fourth quarter of 2026, though no formal timeline has been filed.

Microsoft, which has invested roughly $13 billion in OpenAI since 2019, gets predictability in return. Rather than chasing an ever-larger share of OpenAI's surging top line — annualized revenue crossed $25 billion earlier this spring — Redmond locks in a defined upside and frees itself to deepen its own first-party AI stack, including the in-house Phi and MAI model families. For the broader market, the deal effectively closes the chapter on AI's most consequential corporate marriage and opens a new one in which OpenAI is, for the first time, a fully unbundled platform company.