Google Cloud has accused Microsoft for its potentially anticompetitive investment in AI and cloud in a recent interview with Reuters.
Google Cloud vice president, Amit Zavery, told Reuters that his company was worried about Microsoft creating a “walled garden” of cloud products and infrastructure.
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“We worry about Microsoft wanting to flex their decade-long practices where they had a lot of monopoly on the on-premises software before and now they are trying to push that into cloud now,” he told Reuters.
Zavery also commented on Microsoft’s investment in AI technology. Microsoft has been a long-term investor of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, and is currently entitled to half of OpenAI’s financial return.
Zavery also posted on social media site X that Microsoft should not “pick and choose” the companies that it competes with.
Microsoft should end the arbitrary “Listed Provider” designation and allow customers to run their previously purchased software on any platform without paying as much as 5x more to use non-Azure clouds. Microsoft shouldn’t be permitted to pick and choose who it competes with.
— Amit Zavery (@azavery) February 26, 2024How well do you really know your competitors?
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By GlobalData
Senior analyst at research and data company GlobalData, Beatriz Valle, gave her perspective on the strained relationship between Google and Microsoft.
“The current business model is already giving way to fairly anticompetitive practices by all the hyperscalers and not just Microsoft,” she said.
“In terms of the cloud computing market, there are interesting considerations to take into account,” she said, explaining that the cloud computing business model was uniquely shaping the nascent AI generative AI market.
“What we need to highlight is the financial interdependencies between the hyperscalers and the startups in the market,” she said, “All the US hyperscalers have been on the receiving end of regulatory reprimanding lately including a recent case where the Federal Trade Commission in the US launched an investigation against Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI, Alphabet and Anthropic.”
Valle stated that some of the money that Big Tech is investing into smaller AI startups is bouncing back towards the investor companies.
AI startups, she explained, are largely dependent on bigger companies for the computing power that is necessary for training their AI models.
