OpenAI raises $40 billion, valued at $300 billion in historic funding round

OpenAI said on Monday that it has collected $40 billion in a fresh investment round, valuing the ChatGPT manufacturer at $300 billion, the largest capital-raising session ever for a business.

The funding comes from a collaboration with Japanese investment firm SoftBank Group and “enables us to push the frontiers of AI research even further,” according to a post on the San Francisco-based company’s website.

“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,” the company said.

AGI refers to a computational platform that possesses human-level intelligence.

The company intends to extend its infrastructure and “deliver increasingly powerful tools for the 500 million people who use ChatGPT every week.”

Opening up?

The investment announcement came on the same day that OpenAI revealed it was developing a more open generative AI model. In the open-source field, it faced more competition from Chinese rival DeepSeek, and Meta.

The move would represent a strategic shift for OpenAI, which has previously been a staunch supporter of closed, proprietary models that prevent developers from modifying the fundamental technology to make AI more tailored to their needs.

OpenAI and supporters of closed models, like Google, have frequently criticised open models as riskier and more prone to negative applications by hostile actors or non-US governments.

OpenAI’s embrace of closed models has also been a bone of contention in its battles with former investor Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, who has called on OpenAI to honor the spirit of the company’s name and “return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was.”

Putting pressure on OpenAI, many large companies and governments have proved reluctant to build their AI products or services on models they have no control over, especially when data security is a concern.

The core selling point of Meta’s family of Llama models or DeepSeek’s models is addressing these worries by letting companies download their models and have far greater control to modify the technology for their own purposes and keep control of their data.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said earlier this month that Llama hit one billion downloads, while the release of DeepSeek’s lower-cost R1 model in January rocked the world of artificial intelligence.

“We’ve been thinking about this for a long time, but other priorities took precedence. Now it feels important to do,” OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said on X of the decision to build a more open model.

OpenAI has been riding on the success of its latest image-generation features in ChatGPT, the world-leading AI app and chatbot.

Altman posted on Monday that the tool helped add “one million users” in one hour.

That claim came days after Altman said the new image features were so popular that they were melting the OpenAI graphics processing units that power the AI due to heavy use.