Microsoft has been turning its OpenAI deal into a big business. Earlier this year, much of its Azure OpenAI offering, which provides access to OpenAI's language models, was contingent on a single big spender: TikTok. But I've now seen a recent list of its top customers, and it's clear that Microsoft has managed to diversify the business with a selection of major clients spending more than $1 million per month on Azure OpenAI services.
The software giant has a running list of what it considers its top 10 customers for Azure OpenAI, and I'm told Adobe and Meta both spent more than $1 million on Microsoft's AI services in September alone to make the top 10 customer list. Both Adobe and Meta are primarily using Microsoft's provisioned output for access to OpenAI models, which provides dedicated model processing capacity rather than Microsoft's token-based offerings for text and image generation.
Meta and Adobe's use of Azure OpenAI still falls far behind TikTok owner ByteDance's, though. The Information reported earlier this year that TikTok was paying Microsoft almost $20 million per month to access OpenAI's models, making up nearly a quarter of the revenue generated by Azure OpenAI at the time. ByteDance's spending on Azure OpenAI is now less than 15 percent of Microsoft's Azure OpenAI business, thanks in part to a more diverse amount of customer spending on Microsoft's AI services and ByteDance spending less.