Microsoft’s fastest-growing AI market is the one America fears most

While American lawmakers warn that Chinese AI poses an existential threat to US dominance, Microsoft has quietly turned the country into a billion-dollar business, selling OpenAI’s models to the very firms Washington is wary of. ByteDance, the Beijing owner of TikTok, has been Microsoft’s single largest AI customer in recent years and is on track to spend upwards of $1 billion a year on its AI and cloud services, Bloomberg reports.The catch is what ByteDance mostly buys: OpenAI’s GPT models, piped through Microsoft’s Azure cloud, in a market OpenAI itself won’t go near. And it isn’t alone. Ant Group, Meituan and Tencent are also big spenders on AI through Azure, leaving Microsoft as the one company channelling America’s best models into the hands of its biggest tech rivals, distillation fears and all.

The one company selling American AI where its makers won’t