OpenAI has announced a blockbuster funding round of $110bn that would value the ChatGPT maker at $840bn, underscoring the feverish pace of investment in artificial intelligence.
The round, which remains open, includes a $30bn investment from SoftBank, $30bn from Nvidia, and $50bn from Amazon. It more than doubles the $40bn raised last year, which was the largest private tech deal on record. The funding comes ahead of an expected mega-IPO later this year, with more investors anticipated to join.
OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said the company was entering a new phase where frontier AI moves from research into daily use at global scale. ChatGPT now has more than 900 million weekly active users and over 50 million consumer subscribers. The firm also highlighted the growth of its cloud-based software engineering agent, Codex, which has seen weekly users more than triple since the start of the year to 1.6 million.
Amazon will make an initial investment of $15bn, followed by a further $35bn in the coming months when certain conditions are met. As part of the deal, OpenAI will use two gigawatts of computing capacity powered by Amazon's in-house Trainium chips, while AWS becomes the exclusive third-party cloud provider for OpenAI Frontier. The partnership does not alter OpenAI's existing relationship with Microsoft, which remains the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI's APIs, and Azure will continue to host its first-party products.
The investment comes amid growing concerns about the costs of AI expansion, including pressure on energy and water supplies from massive datacenters, and fears of job losses. On Thursday, fintech company Block announced it would cut 4,000 of its 10,000 employees because of gains in AI productivity, a trend Goldman Sachs noted last year resulted in 5,000 to 10,000 monthly net job losses.
