“The FTC’s antitrust investigation into Microsoft’s cloud services and AI partnerships could definitely lead to regulatory interventions affecting licensing terms, pricing models, and competition in the enterprise AI and cloud services market,” said Mukesh Ranjan, vice president at Everest Group. “Enterprises relying on Microsoft may face disruptions or increased costs as licensing agreements are revised.”
Heightened regulatory scrutiny of Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI could also fuel greater competition in the AI sector, benefiting rival service providers.
“We are already seeing significant innovation in this space post the release of DeepSeek,” Ranjan added. “For example, Google recently unveiled Gemma 3, an advanced AI model designed to operate efficiently on a single GPU, which it claims to be much better than OpenAI offerings.”