OpenAI on Friday announced it will raise $110 billion in a major funding round that values the ChatGPT maker at $840 billion, in a deal that shows the frenetic pace of investment in artificial intelligence.
The funding round includes investments of $30 billion from SoftBank, $30 billion from Nvidia, and $50 billion from Amazon, and comes ahead of the AI startup’s big IPO planned for later this year.
Big Tech companies and major tech investors such as SoftBank are racing to forge partnerships with OpenAI, which has invested heavily in data centers, betting that a closer relationship with the company will give it a competitive edge in the AI race.
Amazon will start with an initial investment of $15 billion and then plans to invest an additional $35 billion over the next few months if certain conditions are met.
In addition to this investment, OpenAI and Amazon also signed an agreement in which OpenAI will access 2 gigawatts of computing power powered by Amazon’s in-house Trainium chips, the companies said.
AWS, Amazon’s cloud computing platform, will also be the exclusive third-party cloud provider for OpenAI Frontier, the ChatGPT maker’s enterprise platform for building, deploying, and managing AI agents.
This partnership does not change the existing relationship between OpenAI and Microsoft. Microsoft Azure remains the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI’s API, which provides access to OpenAI’s models, the companies said.
OpenAI’s first-party products will continue to be hosted on Azure, and Microsoft will retain exclusive licenses and access to intellectual property across OpenAI models and products.
It was not immediately clear whether Nvidia’s $30 billion investment would replace an earlier pledge announced in September that Nvidia would invest up to $100 billion in the startup.
OpenAI and NVIDIA did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for clarification.
(Reporting by Deborah Sophia in Bangalore; Editing by Arun Koyur and Chizu Nomiyama)
