OpenAI raises $110 billion at $730 billion valuation, partners with Amazon and Nvidia

OpenAI announced on 27 February said it has secured $110 billion in new funding at a $730 billion pre-money valuation, backed by major investments from SoftBank, Nvidia, and Amazon, as surging global demand for artificial intelligence strains computing capacity.

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The funding includes $30 billion each from SoftBank and Nvidia, and $50 billion from Amazon, with additional financial investors expected to join the round, the company said.

“AI demand is surging across consumers, developers, and businesses,” OpenAI said. “Meeting that demand and providing everyone access to our products requires three things: compute, distribution, and capital.”

The company also announced a multi-year strategic partnership with Amazon and an expansion of its long-standing collaboration with Nvidia to secure next-generation computing infrastructure.

OpenAI said the Nvidia partnership includes “3GW of dedicated inference capacity and 2 GW of training on Vera Rubin systems,” adding to existing deployments on Hopper and Blackwell systems.

“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,” the company said.

Chief Executive Sam Altman said the alliances reflect a broader push to scale AI from research into widespread daily use.

“We’re pushing the frontier across infrastructure, research, and products to make AI more capable, reliable, and broadly useful,” Altman said. “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 global scale.”

OpenAI said its products are seeing rapid adoption across both consumer and enterprise segments. ChatGPT has more than 900 million weekly active users and over 50 million consumer subscribers, while more than 9 million paying business users rely on the platform for work.

Subscriber growth has accelerated, with January and February on track to be the largest months for new sign-ups in the company’s history, it said.

The company also highlighted rising usage of Codex, its software development tool, saying weekly users have “more than tripled since the start of the year to 1.6M.”

“More people are now creating, automating, and shipping software that once required a full engineering team,” OpenAI said.

OpenAI said enterprises are increasingly deploying AI across functions, including engineering, customer support, finance and sales through its Frontier platform, which helps organisations build and manage AI “coworkers.”

The new valuation also boosts the worth of the OpenAI Foundation’s stake in the company to over $180 billion, strengthening its ability to fund philanthropic initiatives such as health research and AI safety.