OpenAI on Monday announced that it closed one of the largest private funding rounds in history.
According to a blog post on the company’s website, OpenAI raised $40 billion in a round that values the company at $300 billion post-money. SoftBank led the financing, CNBC reported. Other participants included Microsoft, Coatue, Altimeter, and Thrive, all of which are earlier backers in the outfit.
“[This new capital] enables us to push the frontiers of AI research even further, scale our compute infrastructure, and deliver increasingly powerful tools for the 500 million people who use ChatGPT every week,” OpenAI wrote in the blog post. “We’re excited to be working in partnership with SoftBank Group — few companies understand how to scale transformative technology like they do.”
CNBC, citing a source familiar with the matter, says that around $18 billion of the funding will go toward OpenAI’s ambitious Stargate infrastructure project, which aims to establish a network of AI data centers around the U.S.
