OpenAI is putting its newest models on a rival's cloud. The company said Wednesday that GPT-6 Astra, GPT-6.1 Sol and GPT-6 Luna, along with its Codex coding agent, are rolling out in private preview inside Google Cloud's Model Garden. Select enterprise customers get access first, with OpenAI targeting general availability in the coming weeks, according to a blog post from the companies.
The arrangement means OpenAI's models now sit on all three of the biggest US cloud platforms. Amazon Web Services started hosting them in April, once Microsoft's period of exclusive licensing ended, and OpenAI added its agents to Amazon's Bedrock service last month. Google is framing the Codex deal as proof it's the only hyperscaler offering all three leading closed-weight model families, since its Vertex AI platform already carries Anthropic's Claude next to its own Gemini line.
Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president and co-founder, called the tie-up "an important step in making our most capable models and Codex available where customers are already building." Thomas Kurian, who runs Google Cloud, said the point is giving customers "a broad selection of models, including those from OpenAI, so they can choose the right model for any given job."
How customers will actually buy it
Enterprises will purchase the OpenAI models through Google Cloud Marketplace and can draw on spending commitments they've already made with Google. Everything lands on a single Google Cloud invoice, which matters to procurement teams more than it sounds like it should. Google says prompts and outputs stay inside each customer's own data boundary and are never used to train models, and the OpenAI systems run on dedicated Google infrastructure rather than shared pools. Codex can already connect to Google's platform, and OpenAI's models are headed for Google Antigravity and the Gemini Agent as well.
OpenAI still calls Microsoft its primary cloud partner. But the Google deal is another sign that the exclusivity era of that relationship is over, and that OpenAI is treating distribution as separate from loyalty.
There's money in this for Google beyond the marketing line. Cloud providers typically take a cut whenever a third-party model sells through their platform. Anthropic, for comparison, pulled 47% of its 2025 revenue through Amazon's and Google's clouds, according to its IPO filing, as Reuters reported. Google's own cloud revenue growth hit roughly 82% in the second quarter, well ahead of the 37% and 42% growth Amazon and Microsoft posted in the same period, per CNBC. All three companies report quarterly earnings next week, which should show whether hosting a rival's hottest models is paying off.
Mike Leone, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, told Axios the deal reflects confidence on Google's part rather than desperation. Gemini, he said, now has to win customers with OpenAI's models sitting directly next to it in the same marketplace. That's an odd position for Google to choose voluntarily, and it says something about how commoditized model access has become even as the companies keep competing head-on in search and in the models themselves.
General availability is the next marker to watch, expected within weeks rather than months.
TBFiled by The Tech Business Desk
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