{"id":305498,"date":"2026-02-27T22:06:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-27T22:06:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/305498\/"},"modified":"2026-02-27T22:06:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-27T22:06:07","slug":"openai-announces-110bn-funding-round-that-would-value-firm-at-840bn-openai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/305498\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenAI announces $110bn funding round that would value firm at $840bn | OpenAI"},"content":{"rendered":"

OpenAI<\/a> said on Friday it is raising $110bn in a blockbuster funding round that would value the ChatGPT maker at $840bn, in a deal that signals the feverish pace of investment in artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s more than double the amount the company raised last year, when it racked up $40bn in the largest<\/a> private tech deal on record.<\/p>\n

This year\u2019s funding round, which is still open, includes a $30bn investment from SoftBank, $30bn from Nvidia, and $50bn from Amazon, and comes ahead of the AI startup\u2019s expected mega-IPO later this year. Even more investors are expected to join.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re super excited about this deal,\u201d OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told CNBC<\/a> on Friday. \u201cAI is going to happen everywhere. It\u2019s transforming the whole economy, and the world needs a lot of collective computing power to meet the demand.\u201d<\/p>\n

Big tech executives have signaled<\/a> to their investors<\/a> in recent weeks that they are doubling down on investing in AI, despite fears that the AI boom could come with heavy costs.<\/p>\n

AI\u2019s expansion is dependent on the creation of massive datacenters, which are facing scrutiny<\/a> by lawmakers and communities for driving up energy prices<\/a> and draining water supplies<\/a>. There are also fears of AI driving up unemployment, as companies try to replace workers with automated processes.<\/p>\n

On Thursday, fintech company Block announced<\/a> that it would be laying off 4,000 of its 10,000 employees because of gains in AI productivity. That dramatic reduction in workforce appears to be part of a broader trend, as Goldman Sachs noted<\/a> in February that AI resulted in 5,000 to 10,000 monthly net job losses last year.<\/p>\n

Big tech companies and large tech investors such as SoftBank are racing to forge partnerships with OpenAI<\/a> \u2013 which is spending heavily on datacenters \u2013 betting that closer ties with the company would give them a competitive edge in the AI race.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are entering a new phase where frontier AI moves from research into daily use at global scale,\u201d OpenAI said in a company blog post<\/a> on Friday. \u201cLeadership will be defined by who can scale infrastructure fast enough to meet demand, and turn that capacity into products people rely on.<\/p>\n

ChatGPT now has more than 900 million weekly active users and more than 50 million consumer subscribers. OpenAI also highlighted the power of its products like Codex, its cloud-based software engineering agent that\u2019s available to paid ChatGPT subscribers \u2013 describing its output as equivalent to a \u201ctop engineer\u201d. \u201cWeekly Codex users have more than tripled since the start of the year to 1.6M,\u201d the company wrote. \u201cMore people are now creating, automating, and shipping software that once required a full engineering team.\u201d<\/p>\n

Amazon will start with an initial $15bn investment, followed by another $35bn in the coming months \u201cwhen certain conditions are met\u201d, OpenAI wrote<\/a>, without elaborating on what they were.<\/p>\n

Along with the investment, OpenAI and Amazon have also struck a deal, in which OpenAI will utilize two gigawatts of computing capacity powered by Amazon\u2019s in-house Trainium chips, the companies said. \u201cThis agreement lowers the cost and improves the efficiency of producing intelligence at scale,\u201d OpenAI said in a statement on Friday<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Amazon\u2019s cloud computing platform, AWS, will also be the exclusive third-party cloud provider for OpenAI Frontier, the ChatGPT maker\u2019s enterprise platform for building, deploying and managing AI agents.<\/p>\n

The partnership does not change OpenAI\u2019s existing relationship with Microsoft. Microsoft Azure still remains the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI\u2019s APIs that provide access to OpenAI\u2019s models, the companies said.<\/p>\n

OpenAI\u2019s first party products will continue to be hosted on Azure, and Microsoft holds its exclusive license and access to intellectual property across OpenAI models and products.<\/p>\n

It was not immediately clear whether Nvidia\u2019s $30bn investment replaced its earlier commitment announced in September under which Nvidia would invest up to $100bn in the startup.<\/p>\n

OpenAI said in its statement that this expansion would strengthen its ability to \u201ctrain and deploy frontier models at global scale\u201d. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang affirmed<\/a> his commitment to working with OpenAI in January in response to reports of tension between the two companies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"OpenAI said on Friday it is raising $110bn in a blockbuster funding round that would value the ChatGPT…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":305499,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,111,139,69,145],"class_list":{"0":"post-305498","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-new-zealand","12":"tag-newzealand","13":"tag-nz","14":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305498\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/305499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}