Microsoft and OpenAI have announced an extended partnership, with Microsoft investing a significant sum into the research lab. This new investment follows previous investments made by Microsoft in 2019 and 2021.

According to a statement released by OpenAI, the funds will be used to continue independent research and to develop AI that is increasingly safe, useful, and powerful. OpenAI, a capped-profit company that is governed by a nonprofit, emphasized its commitment to ensuring that advanced AI benefits all of humanity. The company also acknowledged the importance of Microsoft Azure, which has been crucial in delivering best-in-class performance and scale for OpenAI’s AI training and inference workloads.

As part of the partnership, Azure will remain the exclusive cloud provider for all OpenAI workloads across research, API, and products. In a separate statement, Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, said that the partnership is built around a “shared ambition” to “responsibly advance cutting-edge AI research and democratize AI as a new technology platform.” The next phase of the partnership will see developers and organizations across industries having access to the best AI infrastructure, models, and toolchain with Azure to build and run their applications. This agreement also enables both parties to independently commercialize the resulting advanced AI technologies, paving the way for Microsoft to integrate OpenAI’s products with their own.