San Francisco, Jan 23 (IANS): Microsoft on Monday announced a multi-year, multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI, the developer behind AI-driven ChatGPT which has become a rage.

The tech giant, which infused $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019, did not divulge the investment amount in the "third phase of our long-term partnership with OpenAI". Earlier reports had claimed Microsoft may infuse up to $10 billion in OpenAI.

"We formed our partnership with OpenAI around a shared ambition to responsibly advance cutting-edge AI research and democratise AI as a new technology platform," said Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, Microsoft.

"In this next phase of our partnership, developers and organisations across industries will have access to the best AI infrastructure, models, and toolchain with Azure to build and run their applications," Nadella added.

Microsoft will now increase its investments in the development and deployment of specialised supercomputing systems to accelerate OpenAI's groundbreaking independent AI research.

It will deploy OpenAI's models across its consumer and enterprise products and introduce new categories of digital experiences built on OpenAI's technology.

This includes Microsoft's Azure OpenAI Service which empowers developers to build cutting-edge AI applications through direct access to OpenAI models, said the tech giant.

"The past three years of our partnership have been great," said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.

"Microsoft shares our values and we are excited to continue our independent research and work toward creating advanced AI that benefits everyone," he added.

As OpenAI's exclusive cloud provider, Azure will power all OpenAI workloads across research, products and API services.