Because that's not how it works. Even company cars of General Motors employees have to be purchased from General Motors. Such "free usage" coupons are marketin

Because that's not how it works. Even company cars of General Motors employees have to be purchased from General Motors. Such "free usage" coupons are marketing activities to gain new customers, Microsoft already completed the "dating phase" with OpenAI. They surely don't pay list-price for Azure but it's surely also not free. Moreover, as per Microsoft themselves, the 1bn USD investment into OpenAI carried the condition that Azure becomes the exclusive provider for cloud-services: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/01/23/microsoftandopenaiextendpartnership/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/01/23/microsoftandopen... It's not exclusive because it's free, it's exclusive because "we paid you 1bn USD to buy it from us"