OpenAI raises $110 billion in largest-ever private tech funding round, Nvidia throws in $30 billion — AI startup now valued at $730 billion

OpenAI
(Image credit: OpenAI)

OpenAI announced this week that it has closed a $110 billion funding round backed by Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank — the largest private tech financing in history — valuing the ChatGPT maker at $730 billion pre-money, or $840 billion including the capital raised. Alongside the cash, the company secured major infrastructure commitments tied to Nvidia's next-gen Vera Rubin GPU architecture and a dramatically expanded partnership with Amazon Web Services.

The breakdown is $50 billion from Amazon, $30 billion from Nvidia, and $30 billion from SoftBank, with additional investors expected to join as the round progresses. Amazon's initial commitment is for $15 billion, with the remaining $35 billion contingent on unnamed conditions being met in the coming months. The new valuation marks a significant jump from OpenAI's $500 billion in secondary financing last October, and more than doubles the $40 billion raised last year, which itself was a record at the time.

Under the terms of Nvidia’s stake, OpenAI has committed to using 3 gigawatts of dedicated inference capacity and 2 gigawatts of training on Vera Rubin systems, Nvidia's successor to the current Blackwell architecture. That capacity is in addition to the Hopper and Blackwell systems that OpenAI already operates across Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and CoreWeave.

On the Amazon side, OpenAI is expanding its existing $38 billion AWS compute agreement by $100 billion over the next eight years and has committed to consuming at least 2 gigawatts of Amazon's proprietary Trainium AI chip capacity. AWS also becomes the exclusive third-party cloud distribution channel for Frontier, OpenAI's enterprise platform. The two companies are additionally developing a new "stateful runtime environment" that will allow OpenAI models to run natively on Amazon's Bedrock platform. According to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, this will "change what's possible for customers building AI apps and agents."

OpenAI and Microsoft issued a joint statement Friday confirming the Amazon deal does not change their existing arrangement. Azure remains the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI's APIs and first-party products, and Microsoft retains its exclusive license to OpenAI's intellectual property.

To justify the scale of investment, OpenAI cited its current user figures: more than 900 million weekly active ChatGPT users, over 50 million paid consumer subscribers, and weekly Codex users, which have more than tripled since January to 1.6 million.

“We are entering a new phase where frontier AI moves from research into daily use at global scale. Leadership will be defined by who can scale infrastructure fast enough to meet demand, and turn that capacity into products people rely on,” reads the official press release, which goes on to explain that this round of funding will enable the company to do both and ensure “AGI benefits all of humanity.”

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Luke James
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