By Timothy Prickett Morgan
Publication Date: 2026-01-30 00:34:00
Everyone is jumpy about how much capital expenses Microsoft has on the books in 2025 and what it expects to spend on datacenters and their hardware in 2026. But the number that jumped out to us when reviewing Microsoft’s second quarter of fiscal 2026, which ended in December, was that OpenAI accounts for 45 percent of its $625 billion revenue backlog. That’s $281.3 billion, which will be spent over the next several years.
We can’t assume that this commitment from OpenAI to buy capacity on the Azure cloud to train its models and serve up tokens stretches all the way put to 2032, when the exclusive licensing of the source code to the GPT class of models created by OpenAI runs out. But, given how much money OpenAI is throwing around to Oracle, CoreWeave, Nvidia, AMD, and others – and how much it is raising from SoftBank and others – it is fair to assume that the current book of business with Microsoft is all that OpenAI plans to spend on Azure over the next seven years…
