OpenAI and Microsoft’s ‘frenemies relationship,’ and what you missed at SXSW

Equity

TechCrunch

Founders, Silicon Valley, Finance, Ipo, Vc, Technology, Business News, Startups, Business, Venture Capital, News, Stock Market, Entrepreneurship, Techcrunch

4.2 • 365 Ratings

🗓️ 14 March 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week, OpenAI inked a five-year, $11.9 billion deal with CoreWeave, the GPU-heavy cloud provider, securing its own AI computing pipeline—and a $350 million equity stake in the company. With CoreWeave’s pending IPO and deep ties to Microsoft, OpenAI’s deal marks a significant shift in the AI cloud wars. Today, on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Max Zeff, Anthony Ha, and Rebecca Bellan are diving into whether or not the deal is a power move against Microsoft or just an inevitable step in OpenAI’s bid for more compute, key deals of the week, and what you missed at South by Southwest 2025. Listen to the full episode to hear about: What Kirsten and Rebecca are seeing on the ground in Austin, and which founders are making moves Who’s feeling the ‘vibe shift’ leading up to Y Combinator’s latest Demo Day, and why founders are raising less money Scopely’s $3.5 billion bid for Pokémon GO maker Niantic Equity will be back next week, so stay tuned! Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. For the full episode transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, check out our full archive of episodes here. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. We’d also like to thank TechCrunch’s audience development team. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:45.9	Okay. Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups.
0:46.9	Today is Friday, March 14th.
0:49.3	And I'm Max F, a senior reporter at TechCrunch.
0:51.6	And I'm Anthony Haught, TechCrunch's weekend editor.
0:55.1	Max and I are missing Kirsten, our co-host. But luckily, you are actually going to be hearing both her and
1:00.3	Rebecca Bellen because they are at South by Southwest. Before we get to that, though, Max, you've
1:04.4	been tracking a little bit about the relationship between Microsoft and Corweave, right? Yes. Corweave's
1:09.5	been in the news a lot recently.
1:11.6	They're a big potential IPO contender.
1:14.1	But a big concern about them is that they have a very concentrated revenue source in Microsoft,
1:19.9	which is their biggest customer.
1:21.5	But in kind of a chess move with Microsoft, opening eye is actually pouring $12 billion into CorreWeave, kind of deepening their
1:29.7	direct relationship with them. There's a lot of interesting stuff going on with CoreWeave right now
1:34.1	because they're basically a GPU provider. And the information also recently reported that
1:39.4	Nvidia is actually the second largest Coral Wave customer. And now it seems like Open AI might be the third.
1:45.0	But there's a lot of kind of circular investment going on right now.
	...

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