OpenAI built ChatGPT - the fastest-growing consumer application in history, reaching 100M users in 2 months. Its GPT-4, GPT-4o, and o1 models power Microsoft Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and thousands of applications. Microsoft's $13B investment made OpenAI the most-funded private AI company. Its API generates billions from developers building AI-powered products on its foundation models.
Key relationships in depth
Apple integrated ChatGPT into iOS 18 and Siri as part of Apple Intelligence, announced at WWDC 2024. The deal involves no upfront cash exchange: OpenAI receives distribution to Apple's 1.4B active device base while Apple gets a credible generative AI story without building a frontier model in-house. When users purchase ChatGPT Plus subscriptions through the App Store, Apple takes its standard 30% commission.
Why it matters: The integration gives Apple a meaningful AI differentiator for iPhone 16 while its own on-device models mature. For OpenAI, default placement in iOS represents the largest single distribution agreement in AI industry history at the time of signing, creating hundreds of millions of new user exposures for ChatGPT.
Microsoft has invested approximately $13B in OpenAI across multiple rounds, acquiring an estimated 49% stake. The partnership makes Azure OpenAI Service the exclusive cloud platform for OpenAI's models, giving Microsoft rights to OpenAI's IP through the point of artificial general intelligence. Every ChatGPT query and every Copilot inference runs on Azure infrastructure.
Why it matters: The OpenAI partnership transformed Azure from the number two cloud into the preferred destination for enterprise AI workloads. Microsoft Copilot, integrated across Word, Excel, Teams, and GitHub, is the most broadly distributed AI product in the enterprise market and entirely dependent on OpenAI models.
NVIDIA supplies the GPUs that trained every major GPT model from GPT-3 through GPT-4o and powers all ChatGPT inference. NVIDIA also holds a minority equity stake in OpenAI. OpenAI relies on H100 and H200 clusters, now transitioning to Blackwell B200, to serve 400M+ weekly active users.
Why it matters: The GPT model family transformed NVIDIA from a gaming GPU company into the world's most valuable semiconductor firm. Every compute token OpenAI sells translates directly into NVIDIA GPU utilization. OpenAI's $250B of committed Azure spend, which runs on NVIDIA hardware, is the single largest forward-looking demand signal in NVIDIA's history.
OpenAI and Google DeepMind are the two most prominent AI research organizations competing to define the trajectory of artificial intelligence. Google Gemini (developed by DeepMind and Google Brain, merged in 2023) competes directly with GPT-4o and o3 across consumer, enterprise, and API markets. Google's search integration of Gemini and Microsoft Copilot represent the highest-stakes product competition in tech.
Why it matters: Search is Google's $175B+ annual revenue core, and generative AI is the first genuine threat to the query-and-click model Google has dominated for 25 years. If OpenAI's ChatGPT search or Microsoft Copilot takes meaningful search share, Google's revenue faces structural decline. The race to build AGI will determine which company defines the next computing platform.
Relationships are compiled by VexMap from company filings, announcements and reporting, and last reviewed September 2026. Spotted something wrong? Tell us. Not investment advice.