OpenAI’s $122B round
OpenAI closed a record $122 billion funding round that takes its valuation to roughly $852 billion — a move that traders and execs say ramps up IPO pressure for later this year. ( ). The raise arrives as ChatGPT usage scales into the hundreds of millions (900M weekly active users cited), intensifying the race to monetize massive compute costs. (digitimes.com)
Amazon, NVIDIA and SoftBank anchored the deal, with Bloomberg reporting Amazon agreed to invest up to $50 billion while Nvidia and SoftBank each committed about $30 billion. (bloomberg.com) Bloomberg says roughly $35 billion of Amazon’s commitment is conditional on OpenAI either going public or hitting a defined AGI milestone. (bloomberg.com) OpenAI’s announcement lists SoftBank as a co‑lead alongside Andreessen Horowitz, D.E. Shaw Ventures, MGX and TPG, and confirms continued participation from Microsoft. (openai.com) For the first time OpenAI opened bank channels to individual investors and raised over $3 billion from retail participants, and it said it will be included in several ARK Invest exchange‑traded funds. (openai.com) The company told investors it is generating about $2 billion in revenue per month and reported roughly $13.1 billion in revenue last year, with enterprise sales making up about 40% of that mix. (openai.com) Bloomberg quoted OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar saying the financing “blows out of the water even the largest IPO that’s ever been done,” and framed the capital as giving the company flexibility to invest in compute, data centers and talent. (bloomberg.com) OpenAI has previously disclosed roughly $1.4 trillion in infrastructure commitments, though the company later told investors it is targeting about $600 billion of compute spending through 2030. (cnbc.com)
