OpenAI raises $122 billion at an $852 billion valuation in record round backed by Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank

OpenAI has closed a $122 billion funding round, one of the largest in venture capital history. The deal values the company at $852 billion, making it the most valuable private startup on the planet. Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank led the investment, but the round's most important detail lies elsewhere: for the first time, $3 billion came from retail investors.

Until recently, only large funds and institutional players could take part in private deals of this size. OpenAI changed the rules by letting a broad pool of ordinary investors buy in before the IPO. Part of that access came through specialized platforms that give retail market participants access to pre-IPO shares of tech companies.

The $122 billion round is not OpenAI's first megaround. In late 2023, the company raised $10 billion at a valuation of about $90 billion, and in early 2025 it raised $40 billion at a $340 billion valuation. That puts its valuation growth at almost tenfold in two years.

ChatGPT remains the main driver, with more than 500 million weekly users, along with enterprise products deployed at hundreds of large companies worldwide. SoftBank keeps betting aggressively on an AI supercycle. In early 2025, the Japanese investment firm had already announced Stargate, a $500 billion joint project to build AI data centers in the US.

Joining this round follows naturally from the same strategy. Amazon and Nvidia, for their part, are locking in a strategic stake in the market leader: both are key suppliers of the infrastructure that OpenAI's models run on. The round's structure draws particular attention.

A significant share of the money came directly from retail participants rather than through traditional venture funds. Analysts read this as IPO preparation: the company is getting a broad audience used to the idea of owning its shares before it goes public. According to industry sources, the IPO itself may take place as early as 2026.

The $852 billion valuation puts OpenAI on par with the largest public tech companies. For comparison, a private AI startup is now valued at roughly the same level as Tesla, a company with years of trading history. Yet OpenAI remains unprofitable: according to press reports, its operating losses in 2024 exceeded $5 billion on revenue of about $3.

7 billion. Investors are betting not on current profits but on long-term dominance in AI infrastructure. OpenAI's record round is a symptom of a broader trend.

AI companies now raise capital with an arms-race logic: Amazon has poured billions into Anthropic, Microsoft invested in OpenAI even earlier, Google is building Gemini, and Meta is releasing Llama openly. The stakes are control over the AI layer that the next generation of apps and businesses will run on. OpenAI leads for now, but the scale of the resources being raised shows the fight is far from over.

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