More than 15,000 people are set to attend Italian Tech Week, which kicks off in Turin today with speakers including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. So Arjun joins us live on the ground with more. Arjun, set the scene for us. What is the buzz at the Italian Tech Week?
Yeah, it's all about AI, of course, big topic here. And there's some major players in the space who are attending. A lot of VCs talking about what they're doing for investment. But at the conference yesterday, I had a chance to get on stage with Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott, and we went through a load of different topics, from building AI agents to OpenAI and also chips. And I want to bring you highlights from that conversation because there was a part of it focused on OpenAI, a company Microsoft first invested in in 2019 on the condition that they were the exclusive partner infrastructure-wise with their Azure cloud. In return, Microsoft got certain access to some of this OpenAI tech. But of course, that relationship has changed more recently. Reportedly, OpenAI trying to loosen the grip from Microsoft, and we've seen OpenAI try to chart its own path with infrastructure as well. Now, the question is what is the relationship right now with Microsoft? The two recently signed a memorandum of understanding for the next phase of their partnership. I sat down with Kevin Scott and asked him what is the state of the relationship right now. Let's listen in.
I think at least for me, OpenAI is maybe the most important partner that Microsoft has ever had. And Microsoft is in this interesting position that we've had over its 50-year history a bunch of important partners. It used to be that the thing that drove the entirety of the personal computing industry, which was the technology industry, was this partnership between Intel and Microsoft. And to a certain extent, one of the things that's driving the technology industry right now is this partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI. So from my point of view, I'm the CTO. I'm the one who did the initial OpenAI deals, and I'm still responsible for helping us build the right infrastructure into the future to make sure that OpenAI is getting the compute that it needs, because their growth is just breathtaking and wondrous to watch. So from my point of view, it's a good, productive partnership.
Well, our approach is that Microsoft is a platform company. And as a platform company, you have to give your customers what they're asking for. And the thing that I will say in the API business, the overwhelming thing that customers are asking for is OpenAI models. But in some places, they're asking for Anthropic models. In some places, they want to serve open source models. In some places, they want to serve models that they've developed themselves. We have a whole bunch of models that we're building inside of the company that we had been building before the OpenAI partnership, that we've been building continuously through the partnership, that serve very particular needs inside of our own product portfolio, and some that we just do for Microsoft research because we're trying to have a better scientific understanding of the possibilities of the future of AI. And so in that sense, I don't think anything's really changing. And in order to be the platform that people choose, you actually have to give your customers the things that they want. You can't be insistent that this is all we offer and that's what you're going to have to take.
Big statement there from the Microsoft CTO. Perhaps OpenAI is the most important partner the company has ever had, according to Kevin Scott there. That's a big statement, of course, trying to allay some of those fears about a rocky relationship. But there's no doubt that the relationship has changed. Microsoft integrating other models into its platform as well, while OpenAI is pursuing another path, trying to build out its own infrastructure as well. Be interested to see how that moves going forward. Speaking of infrastructure, that was another large part of the conversation with Kevin Scott, and in particular how the company is approaching semiconductors. Now, in the data centers that Microsoft is building, it uses mainly Nvidia chips, some AMD as well, and a little bit of its own silicon as well. But Microsoft is developing its own AI-specific chips under the brand name Maia as well. It first launched that in 2023, and it's reportedly working on the next generation of that AI chip as well. I asked Kevin Scott about Microsoft's plans when it comes to semiconductors in their data centers. Let's listen in.
7 more exchanges in this transcript
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Scott, K. (2025, October 2). Microsoft CTO: OpenAI is our most important partner ever [Interview transcript]. CNBC International Live. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/367047/
MLA
Kevin Scott. "Microsoft CTO: OpenAI is our most important partner ever." CNBC International Live, 2 Oct. 2025. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/367047/.
BibTeX
@misc{scott2025_367047,
author = {Kevin Scott},
title = {Microsoft CTO: OpenAI is our most important partner ever},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, CNBC International Live. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2025},
month = {oct},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/367047/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
