OpenAI announces completion of $110 billion funding round, pre-money valuation skyrockets to $730 billion

Phoenix.com Technology News, February 27, according to CNBC, today AI company OpenAI announced that it has completed the latest round of financing of up to $110 billion. This round was jointly participated in by three major technology giants—Amazon, NVIDIA, and SoftBank. Amazon invested $50 billion, while NVIDIA and SoftBank each invested $30 billion. After completing this round of financing, OpenAI’s pre-money valuation has surged to $730 billion, up significantly from the $500 billion valuation during a secondary market transaction last October, setting a record for the largest-ever private technology company financing at global scale.

As the largest investor in this deal, Amazon’s $50 billion contribution will be made in stages. The company has committed an initial $15 billion, with the remaining $35 billion to be delivered within the coming months after certain conditions are met. Based on deep financial alignment, both sides simultaneously reached a long-term strategic cooperation agreement. OpenAI will expand the scale of its existing agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS), planning to add $100 billion in cooperation value over the next eight years. In addition, AWS will become the exclusive third-party cloud distributor for Frontier, the enterprise-level platform newly launched by OpenAI. The two sides will also jointly develop customized large models to support Amazon’s application services for end customers at the underlying technology level.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that artificial intelligence is reshaping the global economy, and the industry needs massive collective computing capabilities to meet the growing needs for model training and inference. To support its technology expansion and infrastructure-related spending, OpenAI is gradually clarifying its infrastructure investment plan. The current goal is to achieve approximately $600 billion in total compute spending by 2030. Regarding revenue expectations, the company expects total revenue to exceed $280 billion by 2030, with its consumer business and enterprise business each accounting for half.

Although OpenAI currently maintains absolute leadership in the consumer AI market, it is facing early competition pressure from Anthropic in the enterprise market, and it also needs to continuously respond to the challenge from Google’s Gemini in the general-purpose large model space. For comparison, its main competitors, Anthropic and xAI, currently have the highest financing records of $30 billion and $20 billion, respectively. This $100+ billion round of capital injection will provide key leverage for OpenAI’s compute power arms race.