OpenAI Raises $110B at $730B Valuation in Massive Funding Round

OpenAI has closed one of the largest-ever funding rounds for a private company, raising $110 billion and valuing the company at $730 billion. 

Major AI players such as Nvidia, Amazon, and SoftBank were involved in the round, alongside small commitments from sovereign wealth funds and investment firms. Nvidia and SoftBank both invested $30 billion, while Amazon initially invested $15 billion with an additional $35 billion available when OpenAI goes public or reaches artificial general intelligence. 

The majority of this funding will go towards OpenAI’s investment in data centers and the hardware needed to run them, as well as paying for cloud services, according to the FT. In that way, the money provided by Amazon and Nvidia is rather circular, as OpenAI has signed agreements with both to spend tens of billions over the next few years with them. 

It is also confirmation of a step-down by Nvidia and OpenAI in their $100 billion multi-year framework to $30 billion. There had been warning signs that the larger deal was off, with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang saying it was “never a commitment”. 

The new capital means OpenAI has about $140 billion on the balance sheet, which should be enough to keep the startup chugging along well into its IPO. The company will be able to raise another large amount of capital when it goes public, hopefully keeping it above water until 2030 when the company expects to be cash flow positive. 

Will OpenAI ever be profitable? 

The profitability question has loomed over OpenAI and the broader AI market since it began building out its infrastructure. OpenAI has not confirmed how much it lost in 2025, although projections have it at potentially $8 billion in operating losses, with even higher net losses of between $12 and $15 billion. 

This is from both the operation costs to run ChatGPT and the other AI services, alongside OpenAI’s huge build out of infrastructure as part of the Stargate project. The company has $600 billion in compute spend over the next four years to build five to seven gigawatts of capacity, potentially reaching up to 10GW if all its plans are met. 

With all of this planned expenditure, OpenAI needs to expand the number of individual customers and businesses paying for its tools at a rate not seen before in the tech market. It already has close to 1 billion users on ChatGPT and one million business customers worldwide, which reportedly brought the company $13 billion in revenue in 2025 and was at $20 billion revenue run rate by the end of the year. 

But to reach profitability with these huge commitments, OpenAI would need to see at least a tenfold increase in revenue by 2030 and improvements on the cost-per-use side, either through higher revenue per user or reduced cost per query. A slowdown in this improvement on both sides could lead to a collapse in the overall value of the AI market, as OpenAI is still the leader in both the consumer and enterprise AI markets. 

Building out from ChatGPT

The key focus is building out the capabilities of ChatGPT and the underlying GPT model. When Google Gemini 3 received rave reviews, OpenAI sidelined other projects to optimize the next model to win back market share from Google and Anthropic. 

That has included building out its agentic AI services, which include automating office tasks and vibe coding. It has also been the first major AI chatbot to explore adding ads, which rivals have attacked. If done correctly, this revenue source could rival its subscription business. 

Outside of improving the scale and revenue from GPT, OpenAI has Sora, its AI video generator, but this has not seen anywhere near the same levels of interest. 

The next big thing could be OpenAI’s hardware device, which it could be preparing to launch later this year. The company is working with Jony Ive, the renowned ex-Apple designer, to build a device that could be a pin or a smart speaker. The aim is to have ChatGPT accessible without a smartphone. 

This has been done before by Amazon and others, but OpenAI sees its language model as vastly superior to Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri. With an improved model, users may be more willing to use the service for more tasks, which could lead to interactions such as shopping, booking tickets, and making reservations that Amazon aimed to enable with the original Alexa units.

For more on OpenAI in the headlines, read how the company uncovered a mass shooter’s secret ChatGPT account.

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