In brief
- OpenAI announced $110 million in new investment at a $730 billion pre-money valuation.
- Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank invested in the firm, with Amazon and Nvidia also agreeing to strategic partnerships.
- Microsoft and OpenAI said the addition of new investors and partnerships doesn’t change their deal at all.
OpenAI has announced $110 billion in new investment at a $730 billion pre-money valuation, securing $30 billion each from Nvidia and SoftBank, with Amazon adding $50 billion to the pot. The ChatGPT maker has also revealed broader strategic alliances with Amazon and Nvidia.
ChatGPT now has over 900 million weekly active users and 50 million consumer subscribers, OpenAI said in a Friday blog post. The firm added that its Codex AI coding tool has seen its weekly user base more than triple to 1.6 million since the start of the year, suggesting a strong growth area as more people use AI for coding purposes.
The Amazon partnership focuses on accelerating AI adoption for enterprises and startups, while the expanded Nvidia collaboration includes dedicated inference and training capacity on next-gen hardware systems.
“We’re pushing the frontier across infrastructure, research, and products to make AI more capable, reliable, and broadly useful,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in a statement.
“SoftBank, Nvidia, and Amazon are long-term partners who share our ambition to turn real scientific progress into systems that deliver meaningful benefits for people at global scale,” he added. “Building AI that works for everyone will require deep collaboration across the stack, and we’re excited to do this together.”
OpenAI said that additional investors are expected in the round, with only the three backers and $110 million investment announced so far on Friday. The raise also boosts the OpenAI Foundation’s stake in the company to over $180 billion, expanding its philanthropic capacity in areas like health and AI resilience.
“Artificial intelligence is the most consequential technology of our time, and OpenAI is at the forefront,” said Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang, in a statement. “We have been privileged to partner with OpenAI since its earliest days, as it delivered one breakthrough after another. Together, we will continue to push the frontier—building the infrastructure for the age of AI and scaling its benefits to serve industries and societies worldwide.”
In a separate joint statement, OpenAI and Microsoft said that the addition of new investors doesn’t impact their existing relationship.
“Microsoft and OpenAI continue to work closely across research, engineering, and product development, building on years of deep collaboration and shared success,” they wrote. “Microsoft maintains its exclusive license and access to intellectual property across OpenAI models and products. Collaborations like the partnership between OpenAI and Amazon were always contemplated under our agreements and Microsoft is excited to see what they build together.”
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