OpenAI announced on Friday it had raised $110 billion in new investment to accelerate artificial intelligence development.
The funding round includes $30 billion from SoftBank, $30 billion from Nvidia and $50 billion from Amazon. The ChatGPT maker is valued at $840 billion after the latest funding round.
Amazon will first begin with a $15 billion investment, with an additional $35 billion investment in the coming months “when certain conditions are met”, OpenAI said.
The company said it expects more investors to join as the funding round progresses.
“We’re pushing the frontier across infrastructure, research, and products to make AI more capable, reliable, and broadly useful,” chief executive Sam Altman said.
Abu Dhabi-based technology investment firm MGX has previously invested in OpenAI, which also has a partnership with G42 on the Stargate data centre project in the UAE.
The latest round of investment comes before OpenAI's potential initial public offering later this year.
OpenAI's funding round comes as other AI companies have boosted their own fundraising efforts as part of the industry's boom. Among those include Anthropic concluding a $30 billion fundraising G Series round, of which MGX had also taken part, and Elon Musk's xAI raised $20 billion in a Series E funding round in January that included investment from the Qatar Investment Authority and MGX.
The circular nature of the finance deals between the companies at the heart of the AI boom have also raised market concerns about what happens if the technology and infrastructure fail to deliver on their promised productivity gains.
Amazon and Nvidia partnerships
Along with Amazon's $50 billion investment in OpenAI, the two companies also announced a multiyear strategic partnership in which OpenAI will consume 2 gigawatts of Amazon's Tranium AI chips.
They are also expanding on a $38 billion multiyear cloud agreement signed last year, with Mr Altman's company saying it will invest $100 billion on Amazon Web Services over the next year.
OpenAI also said it is expanding its collaboration with Nvidia and will continue to use its chips as part of the funding deal.
More than nine million paying business users rely on ChatGPT for work, OpenAI said, and it has more than 900 million weekly active users. The company also said it has more than 50 million consumer subscribers, with January and February expected to be the largest months for new subscribers in its history.
“We are entering a new phase where frontier AI moves from research into daily use at global scale,” Mr Altman said.
“Leadership will be defined by who can scale infrastructure fast enough to meet demand, and turn that capacity into products people rely on.”
OpenAI said “nothing about today’s announcements in any way changes the terms” of its partnership with Microsoft, one of the AI start-up's biggest financial backers since 2019.
The company said in a statement that the “partnership remains strong and central”, and that its IP relationship and commercial and revenue share relationship is “unchanged”.
