By Todd Bishop
Publication Date: 2026-01-20 18:51:00
The launch of the AI lab that would redefine Microsoft caught the tech giant by surprise.
“Did we get called to participate?” Satya Nadella wrote to his team on Dec. 12, 2015, hours after OpenAI announced its founding. “AWS seems to have sneaked in there.”
Nadella had been Microsoft CEO for less than two years. Azure, the company’s cloud platform, was five years old and chasing Amazon Web Services for market share. And now AWS had been listed as a donor in the “Introducing OpenAI” post. Microsoft wasn’t in the mix.
In the internal message, which hasn’t been previously reported, Nadella wondered how the new AI nonprofit could remain truly “open” if it was tied only to Amazon’s cloud.
Within months, Microsoft was courting OpenAI. Within four years, it would invest $1 billion, adding more than…
