OpenAI said on Friday that it had raised $110 billion from investors to pay for its continued growth and fuel the development of artificial intelligence, valuing the company at $730 billion.
Amazon is investing $50 billion in the deal, and SoftBank and Nvidia each also invested $30 billion, OpenAI said. OpenAI was previously valued at $500 billion, and the deal cements its place as one of the most valuable private companies in the world.
OpenAI’s business is unprofitable and needs immense amounts of capital to pay for computing power, A.I. talent and other needs. The company, which owns ChatGPT, is facing intense competition from A.I. start-ups like Anthropic and tech giants like Google, as business and consumers increasingly adopt A.I. tools.
“We are entering a new phase where frontier A.I. moves from research into daily use at global scale,” Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, said in a statement. “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 it now has more than 900 million weekly active users, and more than 50 million subscribers who pay for its services.
OpenAI has relied on partnerships with other big tech companies to help fuel its growth. At first, Microsoft played a huge role providing the computing power needed to train its A.I. models.
(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.)
OpenAI is now tightening its relationship with Amazon. As part of the deal, the company will use semiconductors made by Amazon and data centers operated by Amazon Web Services. The two companies will also develop new products specifically for Amazon’s cloud computing customers.
OpenAI said it would also use semiconductors made by Nvidia as part of the deal.
The investment illustrates the circular deal making at the center of the A.I. boom. Companies like Nvidia, Amazon and Microsoft have invested huge sums in OpenAI, Anthropic and others. In exchange, those young companies purchase computing power from those same investors.
Adam Satariano is a technology correspondent for The Times, based in London.
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