Social media giant TikTok spent a whopping $20 million a month to attain Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI services, a new report has proved.
Citing data taken from a host of financial documents, we’re getting to hear more from The Information about how that certain amount of income from the leading video content app was close to 25% of its service revenue. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Azure service is said to produce a yearly revenue of $1 billion each year or $83M each month.
For now, it’s not quite clear how much the popular app is spending on the service from OpenAI or how much it wishes to spend on it in the future.
What we can confirm is that other customers include TurboTax’s Intuit and also retail giant Walmart as reported by The Information. Also on that list is G42 from Abu Dhabi.
The biggest contribution that TikTok has made is linked to Azure by Microsoft which could now be at risk as proven by a statement from US President Joe Biden. He mentioned how the app would be either sold or banned from functioning in the US within just nine months.
This is because it has been ordered to be separate from its parent roots in China, ByteDance which the country sees as a national security threat. Meanwhile, TikTok’s parent firm is right now fighting this ruling in a court, calling the claims unjustified.
Even in those cases where it’s not banned, it could leave OpenAI or cause a decline in usage as it creates its own lineup of AI models as well as microchips in the tech world. As seen by a report from The Verge in the past, ByteDance was said to be utilizing OpenAI to help design its own respective technology.
Image: DIW-Aigen
Read next: Fake Google Authenticator Ads Spread DeerStealer Malware, Compromise User Data
