OpenAI Secures $110B Funding Round at $730B Valuation, Deepens Cloud and Chip Partnerships

OpenAI Group PBC announced a $110 billion funding round that values the company at $730 billion on a pre-money basis. The capital injection reflects continued investor confidence in the ChatGPT maker as it scales its operations and research efforts.

Nvidia Corp. and SoftBank Group PBC each contributed $30 billion to the round. Amazon Web Services Inc. supplied the remaining $50 billion and simultaneously expanded its technical collaboration with OpenAI, marking a significant deepening of their partnership.

AWS Commitment and Infrastructure Expansion

OpenAI's prior commitment to consume $38 billion in AWS services, announced in November, will be supplemented by an additional $100 billion in cloud consumption over an eight-year period under the new agreement. AWS will deploy its Trainium artificial intelligence chips to furnish OpenAI with 2 gigawatts of computing capacity.

The partnership encompasses both the current Trainium3 chip and a forthcoming generation called Trainium4, which the companies indicated will deliver a "major performance gain," particularly for FP4 workflows—a data format prevalent in AI model operations. OpenAI anticipates its Trainium4 infrastructure clusters becoming operational in 2027.

OpenAI will leverage a portion of this computing infrastructure to support the Stateful Runtime Environment, a new service running on AWS' Amazon Bedrock platform. This environment is designed to power AI agents capable of executing complex, multistep operations by preserving data continuity between sequential steps.

The company will also channel Trainium capacity toward Frontier, a software platform launched this month that streamlines the development and operation of AI agents. Under the partnership terms, AWS will serve as the "exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider" for Frontier.

Microsoft Partnership Remains Intact

Microsoft Corp., which has invested $13 billion in funding and infrastructure support since 2019, continues as a major stakeholder in OpenAI. Both companies reaffirmed in a joint statement that their "partnership remains strong and central." The existing revenue-sharing arrangement and Microsoft's intellectual property access agreement will persist following this funding round.

Microsoft will maintain its role as infrastructure provider to OpenAI. The company's data centers, along with those operated by Oracle Corp. and CoreWeave Inc., host Nvidia chips that power many of OpenAI's computational workloads.

Nvidia Expands Chip Partnership

Nvidia is broadening its chip supply relationship with OpenAI as part of the funding round. OpenAI's existing graphics card clusters predominantly utilize Hopper and Blackwell chips. The expanded arrangement will introduce 5 gigawatts of computing capacity built on the Vera Rubin architecture, which includes the Rubin graphics card—unveiled by Nvidia last month—and a central processing unit designated Vera.

Path to IPO and User Growth

OpenAI expects additional investors to participate in the funding round, with reporting indicating that Microsoft holds an option to join. The company may not seek further capital before pursuing an initial public offering, which could occur as early as this year.

SoftBank Chief Executive Officer Masayoshi Son stated, "Through this additional investment, we will accelerate OpenAI's research and ecosystem expansion, while advancing our own ASI strategy."

OpenAI disclosed that more than 50 million consumers and 9 million business users currently maintain paid ChatGPT subscriptions. The company noted that January and February are "on track to be the largest months for new subscribers in our history." Growth is being bolstered by Codex, OpenAI's programming tool, which has experienced more than a threefold increase in weekly users since the beginning of the year.