OpenAI Raises $100 Billion at a Valuation Above $850 Billion

OpenAI is wrapping up one of the largest funding rounds in the history of the technology industry. According to sources familiar with the negotiations, the company is raising $100 billion at a valuation above $850 billion. The investors include Amazon, Nvidia, SoftBank and Microsoft. If the deal closes on these terms, OpenAI will join a narrow circle of private companies whose value is comparable to the largest public corporations in the world.

Just two years ago, numbers like these would have sounded like science fiction. In early 2023, OpenAI was valued at roughly $29 billion, which then seemed a bold forecast for a company operating on a non-profit footing. But ChatGPT changed everything. The product, launched in November 2022, gained 100 million users in two months and forced the entire technology sector to raise its stakes in the race for artificial intelligence. Since then, OpenAI has gone from a research lab to one of the most influential players in tech, and each new funding round has only confirmed that status.

The investor lineup in this deal speaks for itself. Microsoft has already put more than $13 billion into OpenAI and gained the right to integrate the company's models into its products, from Azure to Copilot. Taking part in the new round strengthens that position and signals a long-term bet on the partnership.

Amazon, for its part, is building its own AI ecosystem through AWS and competing models, but investing in OpenAI lets it hedge its risks and stay at the center of events no matter who ultimately sets the industry's standards. Nvidia is a separate story: it makes the GPUs on which the vast majority of modern language models are trained, and its interest in OpenAI is both strategic and commercial. SoftBank, known for large and often controversial technology bets, continues its push for dominance in the AI sector after investing in dozens of startups around the world.

The $850 billion valuation needs context. For comparison, that is roughly what public giants such as TSMC or Meta are worth today. OpenAI, meanwhile, remains a private company that only recently began to monetize its products actively through subscriptions and enterprise licenses. Its main sources of revenue are the ChatGPT Plus plan, the API for developers and corporate contracts. The company is still unprofitable: according to available data, operating costs for training and running its models run into billions of dollars a year. But investors are clearly pricing in not current financial results but the potential of a market that, by various forecasts, may exceed a trillion dollars by 2030.

For the industry, this deal means several things at once. First, it de facto cements OpenAI as the leader, the company around which a coalition of the largest technology corporations is forming. Second, it increases pressure on competitors: Google with Gemini, Anthropic with Claude and Meta* with its open Llama models have to respond, either by raising their own investment or by rethinking their strategies. Third, the concentration of capital around a few players raises a legitimate question: how competitive is the AI market, and is it turning into an oligopoly before it has even matured?

It is also telling that the deal comes as OpenAI undergoes an internal transformation. The company is moving toward a commercial structure that will let investors earn a profit, shifting away from its original non-profit model. That inevitably raises questions about how the balance will change between the stated mission, "advancing AI for the benefit of humanity", and the interests of shareholders who have put in hundreds of billions of dollars.

If the round closes on the stated terms, OpenAI will find itself in a unique position: a private company with a capitalization comparable to the national economies of mid-sized countries, and carte blanche to define what artificial intelligence will look like over the next five years. The stakes have rarely been higher, both for the company itself and for the whole industry.

*Meta has been designated an extremist organization and is banned in Russia.