‘You’re going to burn this $1 billion’: Satya Nadella recalls when Bill Gates doubted Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI

OpenAI may now be the world’s most valuable private company, but it wasn’t even close to such success when Microsoft invested a billion dollars in the AI ​​startup in 2019. The bet on the company was so uncertain that even co-founder and original CEO Bill Gates advised Satya Nadella against the move.

In a recent interview with tech-focused YouTube channel TBPN, Satya Nadella, now CEO of Microsoft, recalled how Bill Gates expressed his lack of confidence when the company was investing in OpenAI.

“Remember that this is a non-profit organization, and I think Bill [Gates] he even said, ‘Yeah, you’re going to burn this billion dollars,'” Nadella said during the interview.

However, Nadella and his team persisted despite all objections and did not withdraw their bets on OpenAI. However, Nadella stated that due to the size of the investment, it needed to get approval from the board of directors through appropriate channels.

The Microsoft CEO said that despite the large amount and risk of the investment, “it’s not that hard to convince anyone that this is an important area.”

He said people at Microsoft wanted to give OpenAI a chance.

“We had a little bit of a high risk tolerance and said, ‘We want to go try this,'” Nadella said.

Microsoft saw the investment and partnership with OpenAI in 2019 as merely a channel to step into the promising technology called artificial intelligence. They also thought Microsoft could help develop its own Azure’s AI capabilities. But nothing could prepare them for what was about to happen.

“Looking back, who would have thought? I didn’t invest a billion dollars saying, ‘Oh yeah, this is going to be a face packer,'” Nadella said.

Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI

In 2019, Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI to support the AI ​​company in creating artificial general intelligence (AGI) that delivers broad economic benefits.

As part of the partnership, the companies agreed to create a hardware and software platform within Microsoft Azure.

Microsoft began to reap the fruits of its investment in October last year, when OpenAI gave a 27% stake to the company as part of the restructuring, increasing the investment to approximately $135 billion. Microsoft also eliminated its cloud exclusivity with OpenAI, but still signed a deal that will see OpenAI buy $250 billion worth of Azure services in phases.

By January, Microsoft reported that OpenAI had increased its net revenue to $7.6 billion.

How has OpenAI fared so far?

Meanwhile, OpenAI continued to make history and is now credited with bringing AI to the mainstream market and causing major disruptions in the way the world works.

It also performed well financially for the startup, making it currently the most valuable private company in the world.

The company predicts its revenue will grow rapidly over the next few years and exceed $280 billion by 2030, according to a report by Bloomberg.

OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar recently said the company’s annual revenue is growing from about $6 billion the previous year to $20 billion in 2025.

According to another Bloomberg report, the artificial intelligence startup is currently in the early stages of a new funding round that is expected to raise more than $100 billion.