REDMOND, Wash. — Microsoft ex­ec­u­tives say they first learned OpenAI was see­ing other cloud providers af­ter an Azure en­gi­neer stum­bled across the com­pa­ny’s Tinder pro­file late Tuesday night while swip­ing through hy­per­scalers, where its re­la­tion­ship sta­tus was listed as “It’s com­pli­cated ($13B com­pli­cated).”

According to in­ter­nal mes­sages re­viewed by Least Squared, the en­gi­neer ini­tially as­sumed the ac­count was a par­ody un­til the pro­file photo matched the same taste­ful three‑quar­ter‑an­gle GPU clus­ter used as the hero im­age in OpenAI’s GPT‑4 launch blog. The bio re­port­edly listed in­ter­ests in­clud­ing “large lan­guage mod­els, long walks across avail­abil­ity zones, and ex­plor­ing other clouds, dis­creet.”

Screenshots of the pro­file cir­cu­lated through a Microsoft Teams chan­nel la­beled “AI Strategic Partnership,” where sev­eral em­ploy­ees asked whether the com­pany had al­ways been “seeing other hy­per­scalers ca­su­ally” or if this was a re­cent de­vel­op­ment. One se­nior man­ager re­port­edly re­sponded by zoom­ing in on a no­ti­fi­ca­tion show­ing OpenAI had re­cently matched with both Google Cloud and AWS.

Microsoft de­clined to com­ment on the screen­shots but said in a state­ment that its re­la­tion­ship with OpenAI re­mains “strong and col­lab­o­ra­tive,” adding that the com­pa­nies are “continuing to ex­plore what works best for every­one in­volved at this stage of the in­fra­struc­ture life­cy­cle.” Sources in­side Redmond con­firmed the state­ment was drafted shortly af­ter ex­ec­u­tives no­ticed OpenAI had up­dated its bio to read: “Not look­ing for any­thing ex­clu­sive right now. Just ex­plor­ing multi‑cloud con­nec­tions.”