Open AI Just Raised a Record $40 Billion

Open AI has secured $40 billion in funding, the most money–by far–ever raised by a privately held technology firm. The deal values the firm at $300 billion.

“This funding 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,” an Open AI statement notes. “We’re excited to be working in partnership with SoftBank Group–few companies understand how to scale transformative technology like they do. Their support will help us continue building AI systems that drive scientific discovery, enable personalized education, enhance human creativity, and pave the way toward AGI that benefits all of humanity.”

The $40 billion in funding includes $30 billion from Softbank and $10 billion from Microsoft, Coatue, Altimeter and Thrive. CNBC reports that Open AI will use about $18 billion of this investment to fund its Stargate project.

Open AI doesn’t get all the money upfront. Instead, it gets $10 billion immediately, with the remaining $30 billion coming later in 2025. The amount could also be cut by $10 billion to $30 billion total if Open AI doesn’t complete its transition to a for-profit company by December 31.

Either way, the deal is enormous. Before today’s funding, the biggest private equity deal in the tech space was the $14 billion that Ant Group raised in 2018. Open AI is now the third-largest privately held company by value, behind just SpaceX, at $350 billion, and ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok.

Open AI CEO Sam Altman emphasized how fast the company is growing.

“The ChatGPT launch 26 months ago was one of the craziest viral moments I’d ever seen, and we added one million users in five days [then],” he tweeted. “[Today,] we added one million users in the last hour.”