Peter Smith
⬤ OpenAI has locked in $110 billion in fresh funding at a $730 billion pre-money valuation. The round is anchored by SoftBank ($30B), NVIDIA (NVDA) ($30B), and Amazon (AMZN) ($50B), according to Walter Bloomberg. Alongside the capital, the deal includes expanded AI compute access, new strategic partnerships, and a meaningfully larger stake and financial cushion for the OpenAI Foundation.
⬤ The participation of cloud and hardware giants says a lot about where AI investment is heading. NVIDIA's involvement cements its position as the go-to AI chip provider, while Amazon's $50 billion commitment points to deep cloud-infrastructure alignment. SoftBank's contribution rounds out a funding round that pushes OpenAI firmly into the top tier of the world's most valuable private companies.
With this capital backing and strategic compute alignment, OpenAI is positioned to accelerate model development and infrastructure scaling.
⬤ On the usage side, the numbers are hard to ignore. ChatGPT now counts over 900 million weekly users, more than 50 million subscribers, and upwards of 9 million paying business customers. That kind of traction across both consumer and enterprise segments points to strong monetization headroom as generative AI keeps spreading across industries.
⬤ The raise lands at a pivotal moment for AI economics. With $110 billion secured and key compute partners on board, OpenAI has the runway to push model development faster and scale infrastructure to match demand. Continued alignment with NVIDIA and Amazon could tightly weave OpenAI's workloads into leading hardware and cloud stacks - and reshape competitive dynamics across the AI sector for years to come.
Peter Smith
