OpenAI has secured $110 billion in fresh capital from Amazon, NVIDIA and SoftBank, marking the largest private funding round in technology history and pushing the company’s valuation to $840 billion, up from $500 billion in October.
Amazon is committing $50 billion, while NVIDIA and SoftBank are investing $30 billion each. The round remains open, with additional investors expected to participate. Chief executive Sam Altman confirmed the raise on Friday, thanking partners and signaling further expansion as competition intensifies across the artificial intelligence sector.
The scale of the financing reflects the economics of modern AI. Training frontier models demands vast computational infrastructure, including thousands of advanced chips and significant cloud capacity. OpenAI continues to deploy capital into large-scale data centers to support ChatGPT and accelerate development of more advanced systems.
Competitive pressure is also mounting. Google has advanced its Gemini models, while Anthropic continues to expand Claude’s enterprise footprint. Maintaining leadership in generative AI requires sustained investment in research, infrastructure and distribution.
OpenAI reports more than 900 million weekly active ChatGPT users and 9 million paying business customers. The company is preparing to introduce ChatGPT Professional, a premium tier aimed at power users and enterprise clients, as it seeks to diversify revenue and strengthen margins.
Amazon’s $50 billion commitment will be deployed in two phases: $15 billion upfront and $35 billion contingent on performance milestones, which may include progress toward artificial general intelligence or a public listing. Beyond equity, the companies are deepening their commercial partnership. OpenAI will expand its use of Amazon Web Services infrastructure, including Trainium chips, while AWS becomes the exclusive third-party cloud provider for OpenAI’s enterprise platform. OpenAI is also expected to develop custom AI models tailored to Amazon’s internal operations and customer products.
NVIDIA’s investment further cements its position at the center of the AI supply chain. OpenAI has committed to substantial inference and training capacity on NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin systems, reinforcing demand for the chipmaker’s high-performance architecture as global AI workloads scale.
SoftBank’s participation marks a renewed commitment after leading OpenAI’s prior $40 billion round. The Japanese investment group is expected to integrate OpenAI technologies more deeply across its portfolio companies.Notably absent from the round is Microsoft, which has invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI since 2019. Both companies indicated their strategic partnership remains intact, with Microsoft retaining the option to participate at a later stage.
LThe financing positions OpenAI for a potential initial public offering later this year, one that could rank among the largest in technology history. For perspective, the entire U.S. venture capital industry deployed roughly $170 billion across all startups in 2023. OpenAI has now raised more than half that figure in a single transaction, underscoring how central artificial intelligence has become to global capital markets.
