OpenAI has raised more than $40 billion in a fundraise with Japanese telco SoftBank and other investors, valuing the ChatGPT company at more than $300bn. SoftBank has pledged to invest an initial $10bn into OpenAI, with $30bn more to come should the AI company hit certain targets by the end of 2025. The Japanese firm […]
OpenAI has raised more than $40 billion in a fundraise with Japanese telco SoftBank and other investors, valuing the ChatGPT company at more than $300bn.
SoftBank has pledged to invest an initial $10bn into OpenAI, with $30bn more to come should the AI company hit certain targets by the end of 2025.
The Japanese firm made up around 75% of the new investment raised, with the rest provided by Microsoft, already a key investor in the company. The fundraise amounts to the largest private tech funding round ever recorded – three times the largest amount previously raised, according to PitchBook.
The valuation puts OpenAI as one of the world’s most valuable private companies, behind only SpaceX which is valued at $350bn, according to CB Insights.
“AI is a defining force shaping humanity’s future,” said Masayoshi Son, the chair and chief executive of SoftBank. “Our expanded partnership with OpenAI accelerates our shared vision to unlock its full potential.”
OpenAI said it will use the funding to push research towards artificial general intelligence (AGI), the term used to describe AI systems that can match or exceed humans in cognitive tasks.
According to CBS reports, $18bn of the funding is expected to be used for OpenAI’s commitment to Stargate, a $500bn joint venture between OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle aimed at creating thousands of high-tech jobs and establish the US as a global AI leader.
“Hundreds of millions of people use ChatGPT each week,” said the OpenAI chief executive, Sam Altman. “This investment helps us push the frontier and make AI more useful in everyday life.”
The investment comes as new image generation features sparked concerns from artists that ChatGPT to replicate distinct artistic styles.
Altman said the new features – launched last week for paid subscribers – had seen ChatGPT add over a million users within an hour of going live.
The generative AI sector is poised to surpass $1 trillion in revenue within the decade.
This week, OpenAI also announced plans to build more open generative AI models among growing competition from open-source rivals such as DeepSeek and Meta. The US firm revealed plans to launch an “open weight” version of ChatGPT which can be fine-tuned by users.
“We’ve been thinking about this for a long time, but other priorities took precedence. Now it feels important to do,” said Altman, who has previously defended closed, proprietary AI models. Defenders of this approach, which also includes the likes of Google, have warned that open models will be riskier and more vulnerable to adversarial use.
