OpenAI announced a $110 billion financing round that places the company at a $730 billion pre-money valuation, with the round led by three anchor participants: SoftBank Group Corp contributing $30 billion, NVIDIA supplying $30 billion, and Amazon committing $50 billion.
The company said the investment round includes strategic arrangements designed to broaden OpenAI's infrastructure and distribution footprint, notably with Amazon and NVIDIA. OpenAI also indicated additional financial investors are expected to join the round as it moves forward.
OpenAI reported several usage and subscription milestones in conjunction with the financing news. The firm said Codex, its software development tool, now attracts 1.6 million weekly users, a figure the company said has more than tripled since the start of the year. For its flagship conversational product, the company said ChatGPT supports over 9 million paying business users who rely on the service for work, and that ChatGPT has surpassed 900 million weekly active users worldwide. On the consumer side, OpenAI said it now has more than 50 million subscribers, with January and February on pace to be the largest months for new consumer subscriptions in the company’s history.
OpenAI said the new capital increases the value of the OpenAI Foundation's stake in OpenAI Group to more than $180 billion.
Under the terms of the Amazon collaboration described by OpenAI, Amazon Web Services will act as the exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider for OpenAI Frontier, the company’s enterprise platform that enables organizations to build, deploy, and manage teams of AI agents. OpenAI and Amazon also plan to jointly build a Stateful Runtime Environment powered by OpenAI's models, which will be offered through Amazon Bedrock. OpenAI said the Stateful Runtime Environment is expected to launch in the next few months.
As part of their expanded relationship, OpenAI and AWS are increasing an existing multi-year agreement the companies previously held. The companies said they are expanding a $38 billion arrangement by an additional $100 billion over an eight-year span. OpenAI committed to consume about 2 gigawatts of Trainium capacity through AWS infrastructure to support demand for the Stateful Runtime, Frontier, and other advanced workloads.
Amazon's $50 billion commitment will be executed in stages. The company will initially invest $15 billion, followed by an additional $35 billion in the coming months when specified conditions are met, according to OpenAI's announcement.
OpenAI's partnership with NVIDIA includes allocations of dedicated compute capacity. The companies said NVIDIA will provide 3 gigawatts of dedicated inference capacity and 2 gigawatts of training capacity on Vera Rubin systems. OpenAI noted these commitments build on Hopper and Blackwell systems that are already operating across other cloud providers.
OpenAI and Amazon will also collaborate to develop customized models for Amazon developers to power customer-facing applications. OpenAI stated these offerings will complement models already available to Amazon developers, including Amazon's Nova family.
In prepared remarks included in the announcement, OpenAI's co-founder and CEO said SoftBank, NVIDIA, and Amazon are long-term partners who share the company's ambition to transform scientific progress into systems that deliver benefits at global scale. Amazon's chief executive said the planned stateful runtime environments will change what is possible for customers building AI applications and agents.