ChatGPT creator OpenAI on Monday revealed it is getting up to $40 billion in new funding.
The money came out of a new fundraising round for the artificial intelligence (AI) company in which SoftBank Group is serving as the lead investor.
The Japanese investment group said it has agreed to fund OpenAI with $10 billion in mid-April and an additional $30 billion in December, contingent on the AI firm transitioning to for-profit by the end of the year.
Part of the investment – $10 billion – will be syndicated out to “co-investors” that a source familiar with the matter told Reuters included Microsoft, Coatue Management, Altimeter Capital and Thrive Capital.
OpenAI will only get a maximum of $20 billion in funds from SoftBank in the event that the company does not make the for-profit switch.
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The agreement translates to a $300 billion “post-money” valuation, according to OpenAI. In terms of value, that positions it above public companies like fast-food giant McDonald’s and energy firm Chevron, respectively worth over $223 billion and $294 billion on a market capitalization basis as of Tuesday, and gives it a place among the most valuable private companies as well, according to Quartz.
OpenAI said $40 billion will help it “push the frontiers of AI research even further, scale our compute infrastructure, and deliver increasingly powerful tools for the 500 million people who use ChatGPT every week.”
SoftBank’s support “will help us continue building AI systems that drive scientific discovery, enable personalized education, enhance human creativity, and pave the way toward AGI that benefits all of humanity,” the AI startup also said.
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The Japanese investment firm said it chose to make the “follow-on investments” in OpenAI “in alignment with” the recently-unveiled “Stargate Project” and to “both further support OpenAI’s growth and capture the benefits of that growth in SBG’s NAV [net asset value].”
OpenAI is partnering with SoftBank and Oracle to establish a network of data centers under the $500-billion Stargate project, aimed at powering AI workloads in the U.S. The companies unveiled that initiative in January.
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Other firms like Microsoft, Nvidia, MGX and Arm are also involved in Stargate.
SoftBank has said it has a “mission to realize Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) for the advancement of humanity.” The company’s Vision 2 fund has poured $2.2 billion into OpenAI since the fall as part of its efforts to bring that to fruition.
Reuters contributed to this report.
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