OpenAI has announced a historic $110 billion funding round, the largest private financing in history, at a pre-money valuation of $730 billion. The investment more than doubles the size of its previous raise from just one year ago.
The round is led by three major technology and investment giants: Amazon committed $50 billion ($15 billion upfront with $35 billion contingent), while both Nvidia and SoftBank invested $30 billion each. OpenAI indicated that additional investors are expected to join the round, which has boosted the OpenAI Foundation's stake in the company to over $180 billion.
As part of the strategic partnerships, Amazon Web Services (AWS) becomes the exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider for OpenAI Frontier, the company's enterprise platform for building AI agents. The deal expands OpenAI's existing $38 billion agreement with AWS by an additional $100 billion over the next eight years. OpenAI will also utilize two gigawatts of computing capacity powered by Amazon's in-house Trainium chips.
The expanded collaboration with Nvidia includes dedicated inference and training capacity on next-generation Vera Rubin hardware systems, totaling three gigawatts of inference capacity and two gigawatts of training capacity.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated, "We're pushing the frontier across infrastructure, research, and products to make AI more capable, reliable, and broadly useful." He added that the new partners "share our ambition to turn real scientific progress into systems that deliver meaningful benefits for people at global scale."
Microsoft and OpenAI issued a joint statement clarifying that the new investments do not impact their existing relationship. Microsoft Azure remains the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI's APIs, and Microsoft maintains its exclusive license to OpenAI's intellectual property. The statement noted that collaborations like the one with Amazon were always contemplated under their agreements.
The company revealed impressive user metrics: ChatGPT now has over 900 million weekly active users and 50 million consumer subscribers. Its Codex AI coding tool has seen its weekly user base more than triple to 1.6 million since the start of the year.
Looking ahead, OpenAI projects total revenue of more than $280 billion by 2030, with roughly equal contributions from consumer and enterprise businesses. The company is now targeting around $600 billion in total compute spend by 2030, a revision from earlier $1.4 trillion infrastructure commitment references. An IPO is expected later this year.
