OpenAI is seeking huge investments from a number of its leading technology partners, as the company plans to raise up to $100 billion to meet the growing funding needs of its artificial intelligence business. According to people familiar with the matter, Nvidia is an existing investor in OpenAI, and its chips provide computing power support for OpenAI’s artificial intelligence models. The company is currently negotiating to inject up to US$30 billion into it.
Microsoft is a long-term investor in OpenAI and has the exclusive right to sell OpenAI models to cloud service customers. The investment amount it is negotiating this time is less than 10 billion U.S. dollars; Amazon is a new potential investor, negotiating an injection amount of well over 10 billion U.S. dollars, and may even exceed 20 billion U.S. dollars.
Two people familiar with the matter said that in addition to the above three companies, OpenAI’s existing investor SoftBank is also negotiating to inject up to US$30 billion in capital, and the investments from the above three companies are all additional.
If this unprecedented round of financing is successfully completed, it will alleviate investors' concerns about the speed of OpenAI's cash consumption. Recently, public market investors have become increasingly skeptical about OpenAI's ability to fulfill its related spending commitments with Oracle and Microsoft.
Before the completion of this new round of financing, OpenAI is expected to be valued at $730 billion.
The entry of a number of technology giants will bring OpenAI far more financial resources than before for the operation, training and other computing power-related costs of artificial intelligence models. OpenAI estimated last summer that its related computing power costs would exceed US$430 billion between 2026 and 2030, with cash consumption of nearly US$70 billion during the period. At the same time, this financing will also significantly widen the funding gap between OpenAI and competitor Anthropic - the latter has predicted that its revenue will surpass OpenAI in 2029.
It is currently unclear which investor will invest the most in OpenAI’s current round of financing.
People familiar with the matter said that OpenAI is about to receive investment term sheets from these companies, which are formal investment commitments. One of the people said that this round of financing has not yet been finalized. In addition to SoftBank, other institutional investors may eventually participate, and the final actual capital injection amount of each investor will most likely not reach the upper limit of the negotiation.
The specific amount of Amazon’s investment may depend on a number of separate cooperation negotiations between the two parties, which may include OpenAI expanding its cloud server rental cooperation with Amazon, and OpenAI reaching a commercial agreement with Amazon to sell to it the enterprise version of ChatGPT subscription service and other related products.
OpenAI announced in November last year that it would pay US$38 billion in server leasing fees to Amazon Cloud Technology over the next seven years. Amazon Cloud Technology has also become one of at least five cloud service providers that OpenAI cooperates with for artificial intelligence research and development.
Nvidia pledged last fall to inject up to $100 billion into OpenAI, which will be allocated in increments of $10 billion over multiple years to match OpenAI's chip computing power deployment needs. However, people familiar with the matter said that the investment agreement has not yet been finalized and that it is independent of Nvidia’s negotiations to participate in OpenAI’s new round of financing.