OpenAI Raises $40 Billion at $300 Billion Valuation
AFP/APP
San Francisco: OpenAI announced on Monday that it has raised $40 billion in a new funding round, valuing the ChatGPT maker at $300 billion—marking the largest capital-raising session ever for a startup.
The infusion of cash comes in a partnership with Japanese investment giant SoftBank Group and “enables us to push the frontiers of AI research even further,” the San Francisco-based company said in a post on its website.
“Their support will help us continue building AI systems that drive scientific discovery, enable personalized education, enhance human creativity, and pave the way toward AGI (artificial general intelligence) that benefits all of humanity,” the company stated.
AGI refers to a computing platform with human-level intelligence.
SoftBank, in a release, stated that it is on a mission to realize Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI), which surpasses human intelligence, and that OpenAI is the partner closest to achieving that goal.
“The advancement of OpenAI’s AI models is key to achieving AGI and ASI, and massive computing power is essential,” SoftBank explained as its rationale for the latest investment in the company.
SoftBank is set to inject $10 billion into OpenAI initially, with an additional $30 billion to follow by the end of this year, pending certain conditions.
OpenAI plans to scale its infrastructure and “deliver increasingly powerful tools for the 500 million people who use ChatGPT every week.”
Opening Up?
The funding news coincided with OpenAI’s announcement that it was building a more open generative AI model as it faces growing competition in the open-source space from Chinese rival DeepSeek and Meta.
This move marks a strategic shift by OpenAI, which has until now been a fierce defender of closed, proprietary models that prevent developers from modifying the basic technology to tailor AI for specific needs.
OpenAI and other proponents of closed models—including Google—have argued that open models pose greater risks, making them more vulnerable to misuse by malicious actors or non-US governments.
OpenAI’s stance on closed models has also been a major point of contention with former investor Elon Musk, who has urged the company to “return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was.”
Many large companies and governments have hesitated to build AI products or services on models they cannot control, especially when data security is a concern.
Meta’s Llama models and DeepSeek’s open models address these concerns by allowing companies to download and modify the technology for their own purposes while maintaining control of their data.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently stated that Llama has reached one billion downloads, while DeepSeek’s lower-cost R1 model, released in January, has significantly disrupted the AI landscape.
“We’ve been thinking about this for a long time, but other priorities took precedence. Now it feels important to do,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on X regarding the decision to develop a more open model.
OpenAI has been capitalizing on the success of its latest image-generation features in ChatGPT, the world’s leading AI app and chatbot.
Altman posted on Monday that the tool helped add “one million users” in just one hour.
This claim follows his recent statement that the new image-generation features were so popular that they were overloading OpenAI’s graphics processing units due to heavy usage.
