Microsoft’s absence from OpenAI’s Stargate announcement follows months of tension between the companies and signals a new era in which the longtime partners will be less reliant on each other. At a White House press conference,

Microsoft’s multi-year partnership with OpenAI is taking a new direction as the ChatGPT maker will no longer exclusively choose Microsoft Azure for new cloud capacity.

The new agreement “includes changes to the exclusivity on new capacity, moving to a model where Microsoft has a right of first refusal (ROFR),” Microsoft says. “To further support OpenAI, Microsoft has approved OpenAI’s ability to build additional capacity, primarily for research and training of models.”