OpenAI valued at 300 billion dollars after record-breaking funding round
The investment makes the AI firm one of the best-funded private start-ups in the world.
OpenAI has raised more than 40 billion dollars in a new funding round that values the maker of ChatGPT at 300 billion dollars, a record-breaking deal for a start-up.
The latest funding round has been led by Japanese investment group SoftBank, who will initially provide 10 billion dollars in funding and then 30 billion dollars more by the end of 2025 if certain conditions are met.
In a blog post on its website, OpenAI said the investment “enables us to push the frontiers of AI research even further” and would be used to scale its compute infrastructure and develop “increasingly powerful tools” for ChatGPT users.
The company said 500 million people were now using ChatGPT every week.
“We’re excited to be working in partnership with SoftBank Group – few companies understand how to scale transformative technology like they do,” OpenAI said.
“Their support will help us continue building AI systems that drive scientific discovery, enable personalised education, enhance human creativity, and pave the way toward AGI (artificial general intelligence) that benefits all of humanity.”
The current AI boom was sparked by OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, beginning a technological arms race among tech firms to introduce generative AI tools within their products and directly to consumers.
Since then, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta have all moved into the generative AI space with their own dedicated tools.
OpenAI, founded as a non-profit looking to develop open source AI models, has also begun the process of restructuring itself as a for-profit company, a move which has led to a bitter stand-off, and several legal challenges from Elon Musk, who leads rival start-up xAI and was a co-founder at OpenAI before departing the firm in 2018.
Mr Musk has called for OpenAI to return to its open source roots, rather than the closed models it has so far rolled out.
Open source models can be downloaded and modified by firms to suit their needs, but OpenAI and others have previously suggested that this approach carries more risk and leaves powerful technology open to nefarious use by bad actors.
But on Monday, OpenAI also announced it was building a more open generative AI model, as competition in the AI space intensifies, with open source models from Meta and Chinese firm DeepSeek becoming increasingly popular.
DeepSeek sent tech stocks tumbling earlier this year when it unveiled its low-cost R1 model, while Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg said last month that its Llama AI models had now surpassed one billion downloads.
The record-breaking funding round for OpenAI comes despite fears from some that DeepSeek’s emergence had reset the landscape for funding in the AI sector, having said to have developed its model, which can rival ChatGPT’s performance, despite being developed for a fraction of the cost.
According to reports, 75% of the funding in OpenAI’s latest investment round will come from SoftBank, with the remaining 25% coming from a collection of other investors, said to include long-time partner Microsoft.
