(Bloomberg) — OpenAI has raised $110 billion in a deal that values the startup at $730 billion, representing the ChatGPT maker’s largest funding round to date and bolstering its costly push to secure more computing power and talent for AI development.
Amazon.com Inc. is investing $50 billion in cash in the financing round, by far the largest amount the e-commerce giant has put into any company. Amazon will initially commit $15 billion, followed by another $35 billion when certain conditions are met, OpenAI said Friday.
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Amazon’s additional investment is contingent on OpenAI moving forward with an initial public offering or declaring it’s achieved a more powerful form of AI known as artificial general intelligence, according to a person familiar with the matter. In a public filing Friday, Amazon said it must commit the remainder if and when OpenAI goes public.
SoftBank Group Corp. and Nvidia Corp. each invested $30 billion, OpenAI said. The firm’s new $730 billion valuation doesn’t include the money raised. Post-money, it’s now valued at $840 billion.
The deal, in the works for months, coincides with growing concerns that AI developers and Big Tech firms are spending too much on data centers and chips for AI, with an uncertain payoff. OpenAI alone has previously said it’s committed to spend more than $1.4 trillion on AI infrastructure. To finance those bets, OpenAI and rival Anthropic PBC have increasingly tapped an overlapping group of venture funds and tech companies.
OpenAI expects to bring in roughly another $10 billion from venture capital firms and sovereign wealth funds as the round progresses, said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private information. The plan is to close the funding round by the end of March, the person said.
The large investment from Amazon, a longtime Anthropic backer, also tightens its relationship with OpenAI. As part of the agreement, OpenAI will use Amazon’s line of in-house AI chips, called Trainium, and jointly develop customized models for Amazon’s own engineering teams.
OpenAI will also spend an additional $100 billion on Amazon Web Services over the next eight years. The two companies in November announced a deal under which the model builder would use some $38 billion in AWS services over seven years.