OpenAI Raises $110 Billion Led by Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank, Extending A.I. Boom

Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank led the investment, valuing the parent of ChatGPT at $730 billion.

OpenAI said on Friday that it had raised $110 billion from investors to pay for its continued growth and to fuel the development of artificial intelligence, valuing the company at $730 billion.

Amazon, a new investor in OpenAI, is pouring $50 billion into the artificial intelligence start-up. The Japanese conglomerate SoftBank and the chip maker Nvidia, which have previously invested in OpenAI, each invested $30 billion in the new funding round, OpenAI said.

With the deal, OpenAI, which was previously valued at $500 billion, cements its place as one of the most valuable private companies in the world alongside the rocket company SpaceX and ByteDance, the maker of TikTok.

The new funding round also illustrates the circular deal making at the center of the A.I. boom. Companies like Nvidia, Amazon and Microsoft have invested huge sums in OpenAI, Anthropic and others. In exchange, those young companies purchase computing power from those same investors.

OpenAI isn’t done raising money. Sam Altman, the company’s chief executive, has been in discussions with various sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East about further investments. MGX, a United Arab Emirates investment firm, has previously invested in the company.

More than six years after its founders transformed their A.I. lab into a commercial company, OpenAI is still unprofitable and needs immense amounts of capital to pay for computing power, A.I. talent and other needs. The company pulled in revenue of $13 billion in 2025, but expects to spend $115 billion over the next four years.

OpenAI hopes to make an initial public offering in the coming years, but must first work to balance its books in order to appeal to Wall Street investors.

The company, which makes the ChatGPT chatbot, is facing intense competition from A.I. start-ups like Anthropic and tech giants like Google, as business and consumers adopt A.I. tools in increasingly large numbers. OpenAI said on Friday that it now had more than 900 million weekly active users, and that more than 50 million people paid for its services.

At the end of last year, about 60 percent of OpenAI’s revenue was derived from its consumer products, while 40 percent came from business technologies. But the company hopes to increase the percentage of revenue from businesses over the next year.

“We are entering a new phase where frontier A.I. moves from research into daily use at global scale,” Mr. Altman said in a statement. “Leadership will be defined by who can scale infrastructure fast enough to meet demand, and turn that capacity into products people rely on.”

To help fuel its growth, OpenAI has relied on partnerships with various tech giants and other large investors. In 2019, Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI and agreed to provide all the computing power needed to build and deploy its A.I. technologies. But by the summer of 2024, as tensions mounted between the two companies, Microsoft allowed OpenAI to seek other backers.

(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023 for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)

As OpenAI first built and deployed technologies like ChatGPT, it relied mostly on chips from Nvidia, which dominates the market for the specialized semiconductors that help power A.I. systems. On Friday, the start-up said it would continue to use Nvidia chips as part of its new funding deal.

But since the fall, OpenAI has established several major agreements with other chip makers, including AMD, Broadcom and the start-up Cerebras. As part of the latest funding deal, which is its largest, it has also agreed to use chips designed by Amazon.

As OpenAI uses these and other chips inside Amazon data centers, the two companies said, they will develop new products specifically for Amazon’s cloud computing services. This could help OpenAI secure additional business with the Defense Department, which relies heavily on Amazon’s cloud computing services.

“We think they’ll be one of the big winners in A.I., we can help them grow, and we believe we’ll earn a strong return for Amazon over the long term,” Andy Jassy, Amazon chief executive, said in a social media post.

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