Amazon Leads Record $110B OpenAI Round
OpenAI has closed the largest private funding round in history, raising a massive $110 billion from investors including Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank. As part of the deal, Amazon is committing up to $50 billion to make AWS the preferred cloud for OpenAI's enterprise services.
This record-breaking funding round establishes OpenAI's valuation at $730 billion before the investment, resulting in a post-money valuation of $840 billion. The deal surpasses OpenAI's own previous record for the largest venture financing, a $40 billion round raised in 2025. The investment is structured as a "compute-backed" financing deal, where a significant portion of the funds from Amazon and Nvidia will be in the form of cloud services and access to hardware rather than direct cash. Amazon's $50 billion commitment includes an initial $15 billion, with another $35 billion to follow once specific conditions are met. As part of the deal, AWS will become the exclusive third-party cloud provider for OpenAI's advanced enterprise platform, known as "Frontier," which allows companies to build and manage teams of AI agents. OpenAI and Amazon are also co-developing a "Stateful Runtime Environment" to be available on Amazon Bedrock, enabling developers to create more sophisticated AI applications that can retain context and memory. Nvidia's $30 billion investment secures OpenAI's access to the next generation of AI hardware, including dedicated capacity on Nvidia's upcoming "Vera Rubin" GPU architecture. The agreement provides OpenAI with 3 gigawatts of dedicated inference capacity and 2 gigawatts for training, crucial for handling its massive user base and developing more advanced models. SoftBank's additional $30 billion investment increases its total stake in OpenAI to $64.6 billion. This gives the Japanese investment group an ownership interest of approximately 13% in the AI research and deployment company. The massive influx of capital is driven by surging demand for OpenAI's products. ChatGPT reportedly has over 900 million weekly active users, with 50 million consumer subscribers and 9 million paying business customers.
