OpenAI raises record $40 billion in SoftBank-led round

ChatGPT maker OpenAI said it has raised up to USD 40 billion in a new funding round led by Japanese tech investment group SoftBank at a USD 300 billion valuation.  

This effectively amounts to the largest private tech funding round on record, and the valuation makes OpenAI one of the world’s most richly valued private companies.

SoftBank is leading the round, joined by other backers, including core investor Microsoft.

“Today we’re announcing new funding — $40 billion at a $300 billion post-money valuation, which enables us to push the frontiers of AI research even further, scale our compute infrastructure, and deliver increasingly powerful tools for the 500 million people who use ChatGPT every week,” OpenAI said in an online statement.

SoftBank plans to finance the first USD 10 billion through borrowings from Mizuho Bank and other financial firms.

SoftBank said it would fund OpenAI with USD 10 billion in mid-April and another USD 30 billion in December, subject to the AI firm transitioning to for-profit by the end of the year. 

If OpenAI’s restructuring fails, SoftBank’s total investment amount in the round would fall to USD 20 billion, the Japanese firm said.

OpenAI also announced it was building a more open generative AI model amid growing competition in the open-source space from DeepSeek and Meta. “We’ve been thinking about this for a long time, but other priorities took precedence,” said the OpenAI chief executive, Sam Altman. “Now it feels important to do.”

OpenAI recently teamed up with SoftBank and Oracle to set up a network of data centers as part of the USD 500-billion Stargate project in the United States.

However, despite OpenAI’s rapid growth, mostly on account of the popularity of ChatGPT, the company does not expect to be cash flow positive until 2029, according to a recent report by Bloomberg.