OpenAI has finalized a deal to sell employees’ shares to investors that values the artificial intelligence company at $500 billion, said two people familiar with the agreement.
The deal makes OpenAI the world’s most valuable privately held company, according to data from the start-up tracker CB Insights, ousting SpaceX, the rocket company founded by Elon Musk.
Current and former OpenAI employees agreed to sell roughly $6.6 billion in shares to investors, including the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank and the venture capital firm Thrive Capital, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the agreement.
The news was first reported by Bloomberg.
OpenAI’s valuation has jumped repeatedly over the last 12 months, from $157 billion last October to $300 billion in March. The start-up has raised billions of dollars from investors like Microsoft, the chipmaker Nvidia, SoftBank and Thrive as it works to build A.I. technologies like the online chatbot ChatGPT.
In March, OpenAI reached an agreement with SoftBank and other investors for a funding round to raise $40 billion by the end of the year. But SoftBank has the right to slash the funds it has already committed to the start-up if OpenAI does not complete a complex corporate restructuring it has been working toward since last year.
Mr. Musk, who helped found OpenAI before leaving the organization in 2018 after a tussle for control, has also sued OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, in an effort to prevent the restructuring.
Late last month, Nvidia said it intended to invest $100 billion in OpenAI over the next several years. Nvidia has made an initial investment of $10 billion at OpenAI’s current valuation of $500 billion, according to a person familiar with the agreement. This gives Nvidia a roughly 2 percent stake in OpenAI.
The Nvidia investment was another example of OpenAI raising money from companies it has relied on for products and services. Microsoft, which invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI from 2019 to 2023, made billions of dollars after the start-up paid it for the massive amounts of computing power needed to build and deliver technologies like ChatGPT.
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023 for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)
Cade Metz is a Times reporter who writes about artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality and other emerging areas of technology.
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