OpenAI's massive raise
OpenAI reportedly closed a record $122 billion private funding round at an $852 billion valuation, with $15 billion committed upfront and further conditional commitments announced. The report also says OpenAI expanded an AWS partnership worth about $100 billion over eight years and committed to consuming at least 2 gigawatts of AWS compute capacity, and the company is said to be considering an IPO before the end of 2026. (thedeepdive.ca) (indexbox.io)
OpenAI has reportedly closed a $122 billion private funding round, valuing the company at $852 billion after the money came in. (bloomberg.com) Bloomberg reported on March 31 that Amazon committed $50 billion, while Nvidia and SoftBank each committed $30 billion. The report said Amazon’s deal starts with $15 billion upfront, with another $35 billion tied to an initial public offering or an artificial general intelligence milestone. (bloomberg.com) That total goes beyond the $110 billion round OpenAI announced on February 27 at a $730 billion pre-money valuation. OpenAI said then that Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank were the lead backers, and that more investors could join later. (openai.com) (cnbc.com) The money is tied to computing power as much as equity. OpenAI said in February that demand for its products required more compute, distribution, and capital, and it disclosed 900 million weekly active ChatGPT users, 50 million consumer subscribers, and more than 9 million paying business users. (openai.com) Amazon’s cloud arm is central to that expansion. OpenAI said it expanded an existing $38 billion Amazon Web Services agreement by another $100 billion over eight years, and Amazon Web Services said OpenAI committed to use 2 gigawatts of Trainium capacity, Amazon’s in-house artificial intelligence chips. (cnbc.com) (geekwire.com) OpenAI and Amazon also said Amazon Web Services would become the exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider for OpenAI’s Frontier enterprise platform. Microsoft said the new Amazon tie-up did not change its own commercial relationship with OpenAI, and that Azure remained the exclusive cloud provider for stateless OpenAI application programming interfaces. (cnbc.com) (geekwire.com) The size of the raise also shows how quickly OpenAI’s financing has escalated. SoftBank said on April 1, 2025 that it had agreed to invest up to $40 billion in OpenAI at a $260 billion pre-money valuation, with part of that commitment dependent on restructuring conditions. (group.softbank) By late February 2026, OpenAI had already moved from that 2025 structure to a $110 billion round at a $730 billion pre-money valuation. Bloomberg’s March 31 report then put the completed financing at $122 billion and the valuation at $852 billion including the new capital. (openai.com) (bloomberg.com) Bloomberg reported that OpenAI is weighing an initial public offering before the end of 2026. For now, the company has raised private-market money on a scale that its chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, told Bloomberg exceeded even the biggest public offerings. (bloomberg.com)
