That behaviour concerns its widely criticised practice of charging customers more for wanting to run and host its software (namely Windows Server) in competing cloud environments. It is claimed the tactic can make it cost-prohibitive for enterprise cloud users to run Microsoft's software anywhere but on the software giant's own public cloud platform Azure, which could potentially give it an unfair advantage when it comes to building its share of the cloud infrastructure market.
OpenAI has struck a $38 billion deal with Amazon Web Services that will give the AI giant access to "hundreds of thousands" of Nvidia GPUs to power its AI models. The seven-year partnership comes as Microsoft continues to loosen its grip on OpenAI, dropping its status as its exclusive cloud provider and losing the first right of refusal to host its AI workloads.
Google is trying to capitalize on what it calls "frequent and severe" Microsoft 365 outages by offering up services like email, storage, and videoconferencing to businesses in the event of a Microsoft outage. The search giant's new Business Continuity plan runs a Google Workspace in parallel with Microsoft 365, so if there's an outage then businesses just switch over to Gmail and Google Meet instead of Outlook and Microsoft Teams.