Amazon, Nvidia Lead OpenAI's $110B Round
OpenAI's record $110 billion funding round was led by Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank. Amazon alone is committing up to $50 billion and will provide AWS cloud capacity, making AWS the exclusive third-party cloud for OpenAI's next-gen "Frontier" models.
This latest funding round catapults OpenAI to a pre-money valuation of $730 billion. The massive capital infusion gives OpenAI a balance sheet of around $140 billion, intended to fund operations until a potential IPO, with the company hoping to be cash-flow positive by 2030. While Amazon led the round, Nvidia and SoftBank each contributed a significant $30 billion. The investment from SoftBank brings its cumulative total to $64.6 billion, securing an ownership stake of approximately 13% in the AI leader. The deal with Amazon is more than just a cash infusion. The two companies will co-create a "Stateful Runtime Environment" on AWS Bedrock, a next-generation architecture allowing AI agents to retain memory and context for complex, ongoing tasks. This marks a technical leap from traditional, stateless API interactions. Much of the investment from Amazon and Nvidia is circular in nature, with OpenAI committing to spend tens of billions back with them. OpenAI expanded its existing cloud services agreement with AWS by $100 billion over eight years and will use 2 gigawatts of Amazon's custom Trainium AI chips. Despite AWS becoming the exclusive third-party cloud for the new "Frontier" agent-building platform, both OpenAI and Microsoft affirmed their long-standing partnership remains unchanged. Microsoft
