OpenAI in talks to raise £32bn in new funding round – reports

OpenAI is in early talks to raise up to 40 billion dollars (£32 billion) in a new funding round, valuing the company at more than 300 billion dollars (£242 billion), it has been reported.

According to reports, Japanese tech giant SoftBank could lead the funding round, which would be a record amount raised in a single round for a private company.

News of the potential funding comes in the wake of the sudden emergence of Chinese start-up DeepSeek, which has launched an AI model that appears capable of competing with major US rivals such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT but for a fraction of the cost, challenging previous expectations of what it can cost to develop and launch industry leading AI products.

Despite this, the proposed new funding round for the ChatGPT maker would be a substantial rise in OpenAI’s valuation, which was around 150 billion dollars (£121 billion) following a 6.6 billion dollar (£5.3 billion) funding round in October.

According to reports, some of the money invested by SoftBank may be used to help pay for OpenAI’s commitment to Stargate – a US government-backed joint venture between OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle to invest up to 500 billion dollars in AI projects and infrastructure to help keep the US ahead of China in the global AI race.

OpenAI has argued DeepSeek copied the ChatGPT maker’s work to build its AI models by using a technique called distillation, where a new, smaller AI system learns from a larger, more powerful and established one in order to train itself.

Experts have noted the technique is common in the AI sector, but a number of larger US tech firms have made it a violation of their terms of service in recent years.

AI has become the key battleground technology within the sector in recent years, sparked by the initial rollout of ChatGPT in late 2022.

Since then, generative AI tools – those which are able to generate new content based on a single prompt – have become mainstream through chatbots and other standalone productivity tools, but are also being increasingly built in to the operating systems of smartphones and other devices.

In 2024, Samsung, Google and Apple all introduced generative AI tools to their smartphones for the first time.