Is Microsoft taking control of AI for the world?

ComputerWorld.com reported that  “Microsoft became the world leader in AI by investing $13 billion in OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, then using ChatGPT as the engine behind its Copilot AI assistant, which it has integrated into just about every product it creates.”  The May 28, 2025 report entitled " Microsoft cements its AI lead with one hosting service to rule them all” (https://www.computerworld.com/article/3996150/microsoft-cements-its-ai-lead-with-one-hosting-service-to-rule-them-all.html) included these comments about data centers:

Microsoft’s data centers have, from the start, been key to its AI strategy. Thanks to its deal with OpenAI, OpenAI runs its workloads on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. When businesses subscribe to OpenAI’s ChatGPT enterprise service, Microsoft gets a portion of the revenue, thanks to its cloud services.

To capitalize on that business model, Microsoft in 2023 launched its Azure OpenAI service, which lets Azure customers build genAI apps using OpenAI’s models. Some 60,000 customers have signed up with Microsoft for the service, according to The Motley Fool.

Microsoft’s arrangement with a wide variety of AI companies supercharges that model and reduces the company’s reliance on OpenAI as a partner. Just before Microsoft’s annual Build developers’ conference in mid-May, Microsoft announced it would be hosting Elon Musk’s Grok AI models (called xAI) on its Azure AI Foundry service. In addition to hosting xAI and OpenAI, the service hosts Meta’s AI Llama models and many others.

That way, Microsoft piggybacks onto the success of its competitors — if those competitors get more customers, Microsoft succeeds as well.

What do you think?