OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has secured $40 billion in fresh funding from SoftBank Group and additional investors, valuing the AI firm at $300 billion, establishing a record for startup capital raising.
The new valuation is nearly double OpenAI’s previous worth of $157 billion from its October fundraising. Bloomberg disclosed on March 26 that OpenAI was finalising the $40 billion funding arrangement.
The monetary injection, through a collaboration with Japanese investment firm SoftBank Group, “enables us to push the frontiers of AI research even further,” the San Francisco-based organisation said on its website on Monday.
“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 (artificial general intelligence) that benefits all of humanity,” it added. AGI denotes a computing system with intelligence comparable to humans.
The funding announcement coincided with OpenAI’s declaration to develop a more accessible generative AI system, amid increasing rivalry from Chinese competitors DeepSeek, and Meta in the open-source domain.
SoftBank announced its objective to achieve Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) exceeding human capabilities, identifying OpenAI as the most promising partner for this achievement.
“The advancement of OpenAI’s AI models is key to achieving AGI and ASI, and massive computing power is essential,” SoftBank explained in its investment justification.
SoftBank will initially invest $10 billion in OpenAI, followed by $30 billion more before year-end, subject to specific requirements, news agency AFP reported.
OpenAI intends to enhance its infrastructure to “deliver increasingly powerful tools for the 500 million people who use ChatGPT every week.”
This development indicates a strategic transformation for OpenAI, which previously maintained strict control over closed, proprietary models, restricting developers from modifying the core technology for specific AI applications.
OpenAI continues to benefit from its recent image-generation capabilities in ChatGPT, the leading AI application and chatbot. Altman reported on Monday that the feature attracted “one million users” within an hour.
This announcement followed Altman’s earlier statement about the image features’ popularity causing overheating in OpenAI’s graphics processing units due to extensive usage.