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OpenAI is in talks with investors including SoftBank to raise about $40bn in a massive new funding round, which would push the ChatGPT-maker’s valuation to $300bn.
SoftBank is set to invest between $15bn and $25bn into OpenAI, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday. That investment will be the centrepiece of a wider funding round which could lead to the artificial intelligence company raising as much as $40bn, said two people with knowledge of the negotiations.
OpenAI’s valuation is expected to jump to $300bn, including the new investment, said two people with knowledge of the talks. A figure has not been finalised for the deal, they added.
OpenAI has morphed from a research-focused start-up to a commercial juggernaut since it released ChatGPT in late 2022. The San Francisco-based company in October raised $6.6bn at a valuation of $157bn. That deal made it one of the most highly valued private start-ups in the world.
The valuation and unprecedented size of the latest round suggest investor willingness to back the top US AI start-ups has not been undermined by China’s DeepSeek, which claims to provide high-level performance at a much lower cost than rivals.
OpenAI and its closest competitors have maintained that super-powerful AI systems still require vast amounts of capital and infrastructure to develop and deploy at scale.
A tranche of the investment from the funding round will be used to cover OpenAI’s commitment of at least $15bn to fund Stargate, a major new data centre project the company announced last week with SoftBank, Oracle and Abu Dhabi state fund MGX.
Stargate has committed to build $100bn of new AI infrastructure, rising to as mush as $500bn over the next four years. OpenAI will be the project’s sole customer.
OpenAI’s funding talks, details of which were first reported by the Wall Street Journal, are at an early stage and the numbers may change, added the people familiar with the deal.
The new funding round could put the company within touching distance of Elon Musk’s $350bn SpaceX, the most valuable start-up in the world.
OpenAI and a handful of competitors are racing to build artificial general intelligence, which are AI machines capable of matching or outperforming humans on a wide range of cognitive tasks.
They argue that achieving that level of intelligence requires huge investment — in chips and computing power to train and run cutting-edge models, as well as spending to hire top engineers and researchers.
Rival start-ups Anthropic and Musk’s xAI have raised more than $10bn each, and are competing with some of the world’s best-resourced Big Tech groups including Google and Meta.
OpenAI’s funding round is set to be by far the largest for a US AI start-up to date.
OpenAI and SoftBank declined to comment.
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