OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, is in talks to sell $6 billion in shares owned by its current and former employees to investors, in a deal that would value the artificial intelligence company at roughly $500 billion, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions.
At $500 billion, OpenAI would become the world’s most valuable privately held company, according to data from the start-up tracker CB Insights. The San Francisco-based A.I. lab has raised billions of dollars in recent years from investors including Microsoft, SoftBank and venture capital firms, as it has raced to take the lead in the contest over artificial intelligence.
OpenAI has seen its valuation repeatedly jump higher, from $157 billion in October to $300 billion in March. That month, the company reached an agreement with SoftBank and other investors for a new funding, which was set to raise $40 billion by the end of the year.
In this latest deal, known as a secondary market sale, OpenAI’s current and former employees would agree to sell company shares to SoftBank, Thrive Capital and its other investors, the people with knowledge of the discussions said. The talks over the transaction are ongoing and the particulars could change.
The discussions over a secondary market sale were earlier reported by Bloomberg.
Across Silicon Valley, A.I. companies have been deluged by investor interest amid an escalation in the race over the technology. Meta, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and OpenAI are spending billions to hire A.I. researchers to advance the technology, as well as building out data centers and other infrastructure to power the development of A.I.
Investors are eager to get a piece of the action. Venture capital deals for A.I. start-ups reached $129 billion this year through Aug. 18, up from $106 billion for all of 2024, according to data from PitchBook, which tracks start-ups.
On Tuesday, Databricks, a San Francisco company that makes software to help businesses store and analyze data using A.I., announced a new funding that it said valued it at more than $100 billion, up from $62 billion previously. Ali Ghodsi, a co-founder and the chief executive of Databricks, said the company had not actively been looking to raise money but had started receiving calls, texts, emails and WhatsApp messages from investors a couple of weeks ago.
He said the flood of interest followed the initial public offering of Figma, a design software start-up that exceeded expectations by soaring to a $67.7 billion market capitalization on its first trading day last month.
“Everybody thinks it’s a big market opportunity,” Mr. Ghodsi said. “It wouldn’t be smart for me to say let’s wait another two years before we do that investment.”
He said Databricks has “no immediate plans” to go public. Before this latest financing, the start-up, which was founded in 2013, had raised $19 billion from investors including Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. The company did not disclose the funding amount it raised on Tuesday because the round has not closed.
OpenAI has been raising money as it competes fiercely with rivals like Google. In its March fund-raising for $40 billion, SoftBank is providing 75 percent of the funding, with other investors chipping in the rest. While the other investors have delivered their share, SoftBank has until the end of the year to do so. SoftBank can reduce its share of the round to $20 billion from $30 billion if OpenAI does not change its unorthodox structure by the end of the year.
OpenAI is an unusual combination of a nonprofit and for-profit company. For the past 18 months, it has worked to adopt a more traditional corporate structure that would eventually allow it to go public. But Elon Musk, one of OpenAI’s founders, who now runs a rival A.I. company called xAI, is trying to block the company’s efforts to restructure through a lawsuit in federal court.
Others have called on the attorneys general in California, where OpenAI is headquartered, and in Delaware, where the company was registered, to stop the restructuring, saying that OpenAI is abandoning the original mission of the nonprofit. OpenAI’s stated mission was to build A.I. for the benefit of humanity, not for financial gain. Both attorneys general have said they are monitoring the situation.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, accusing them of copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. OpenAI and Microsoft 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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