A $110 billion fundraise at a $730 billion valuation for OpenAI has just changed the world forever

The world’s biggest fund raise by a tech company is here.

At $110 billion, OpenAI just secured the world's largest fundraising round, valuing the makers of ChatGPT at a staggering $730 billion. The fundraiser remains open, indicating more investors are likely to contribute to OpenAI. The fundraising is also more than double the size of its last raise a year ago, then a record for a private tech company.

“Today we’re announcing $110B in new investment at a $730B pre-money valuation,” OpenAI said in a press release. “This includes $30B from SoftBank, $30B from NVIDIA, and $50B from Amazon. We’ve also signed a strategic partnership with Amazon and secured next-generation inference compute with NVIDIA. Additional financial investors are expected to join as the round progresses.”

The firm’s new $730 billion valuation doesn’t include the money raised. Post-money, it’s now valued at $840 billion, making it the most valuable startup in the world. “These partnerships expand our global reach, deepen our infrastructure, and strengthen our balance sheet so we can bring frontier AI to more people, more businesses, and more communities worldwide,” OpenAI said in the statement.

OpenAI’s latest fundraising round comes at a time when Anthropic-owned Claude has rewritten the rules of AI in recent months. Anthropic unveiled Claude Cowork, an enterprise-focused, agentic AI workspace, in January this year. It can plan, execute, and automate tasks directly on a user’s computer. A few weeks later, Anthropic followed that up by introducing 11 new plugins for Claude Cowork, helping turn Claude from a conversational assistant into a function-specific workplace collaborator. 

The fundraiser is also expected to give OpenAI some leverage, a direct competitor of Anthropic in the generative AI industry. Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers who left because they believed OpenAI was not paying enough attention to safety.  Anthropic raised $30 billion in a funding round earlier this month, valuing the Company at $380 billion, with investors including Nvidia and Microsoft.

“We are entering a new phase where frontier AI moves from research into daily use at a global scale,” OpenAI said in the press statement. “Leadership will be defined by who can scale infrastructure fast enough to meet demand, and turn that capacity into products people rely on. This funding and these partnerships let us do both, and move faster on our mission to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity.”

ChatGPT has more than 900 million weekly active users, and 50 million subscribers. Subscriber momentum, the company says accelerated significantly since the beginning of the year and could emerge the largest months for new subscribers in the company's history. "People use ChatGPT to learn, write, plan, and build," the company says. "As usage scales, the product improves in ways people feel immediately: faster responses, higher reliability, stronger safety, and more consistent performance."

The valuation from this new round increases the OpenAI Foundation’s stake in OpenAI Group to over $180 billion. Additionally, OpenAI and Amazon are jointly developing a Stateful Runtime Environment powered by OpenAI’s models, available through Amazon Bedrock.

“Stateful developer environments are the next generation of how frontier models will be used, seamlessly enabling models to access elements like compute, memory, and identity,” OpenAI says. “A Stateful Runtime Environment allows developers to keep context, remember prior work, work across software tools and data sources, and access compute. They're designed to handle ongoing projects and workflows.”

Coincidentally, the announcement comes on a day when Anthropic has refused to comply with a request from the United States Department of Defense to remove certain safeguards from its AI systems, despite warnings that it could be cut off from access to Pentagon systems. It also came a time when Twitter founder and chairman of tech company, Block, Jack Dorsey, announced that his company is laying off 40 percent of its workforce due to AI.

“We’re pushing the frontier across infrastructure, research, and products to make AI more capable, reliable, and broadly useful. SoftBank, NVIDIA, and Amazon are long-term partners who share our ambition to turn real scientific progress into systems that deliver meaningful benefits for people at a global scale,” Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, said. “Building AI that works for everyone will require deep collaboration across the stack, and we’re excited to do this together.”