TechCrunch reported on 28 October 2026 that Microsoft recorded USD 10 billion in revenue from commercial arrangements with OpenAI in the quarter ended 30 September. Microsoft said the figure includes revenue-sharing payments, and it represented nearly 11% of Microsoft’s total quarterly revenue of USD 92.3 billion.
Because Microsoft’s financial year begins in July, the quarter ended 30 September was the first quarter of fiscal 2027. For the full 2026 fiscal year, Microsoft recorded USD 24.1 billion in revenue from OpenAI-related arrangements.
What the filing shows
The filing gives a rare financial view of the Microsoft and OpenAI relationship. It does not say how much of the USD 10 billion came from revenue-sharing payments and how much came from Azure cloud services bought by OpenAI.
That split matters for interpretation. Revenue sharing would reflect OpenAI’s own commercial activity, while Azure services would reflect compute and cloud consumption by OpenAI. The filing gives the combined number, not the mechanics behind it.
A simple annualisation of the September-quarter figure would be USD 40 billion. That is not guidance, and one quarter may include items that do not repeat at the same level.
Receivables are a separate line
Microsoft also reported USD 7.2 billion in outstanding receivables from OpenAI at the end of September. That was up from USD 6 billion at the end of June.
The receivable figure represents amounts OpenAI owed for previous transactions. It is not additional revenue and should not be added to the USD 10 billion quarterly revenue figure.
The changing partnership
The financial link remains material even as Microsoft and OpenAI increasingly compete for the same customers. The companies began loosening their once-exclusive partnership in October 2025, when Microsoft gave OpenAI more freedom to work with other cloud providers.
As part of that October 2025 agreement, OpenAI committed to buy an additional USD 250 billion in Azure services. Under an April 2026 agreement, OpenAI remains obliged to share revenue with Microsoft through 2030, subject to a cap, while also being allowed to use competing cloud providers.
Microsoft’s ownership stake in OpenAI also declined. It stood at about 24% in September, down from about 25% in June and roughly 27% after OpenAI’s October 2025 recapitalisation. Microsoft did not specify what caused the dilution.
What customers can take from it
For customers using Azure OpenAI services or buying OpenAI services directly, the filing does not announce changes to pricing, service limits or model availability. It does show that OpenAI remains a large source of Microsoft revenue and that Azure remains part of OpenAI’s commercial commitments.
The open issue is concentration. Enterprises building services on a single model route or a single cloud route still need to consider supplier dependency, capacity assumptions and the contractual shape of their own deployments. Microsoft’s filing gives the scale of the relationship, but not enough detail to infer which side carries more of the cost or margin.
When one AI provider is also a customer, cloud buyer and model partner of the platform provider, the commercial assumptions behind Azure AI Foundry and agentic AI deployments are questions ECS's Core AI topic deals with, alongside the EU AI Act and responsible AI. Sessions and workshops give attendees product group contact and practitioner experience on model selection, provider dependency and deployment controls. Bring the commercial and architectural questions that are hard to settle from filings and service documentation alone.
Photo: Jonathan Schilling, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
This article was written by the ECS editorial team with the assistance of Amal Agent, run.events' AI assistant, which supported the research, drafting and proofreading.