OpenAI Raises $40B, Hits $300B Valuation in Historic Deal

On Monday, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced it had raised $40 billion in a new funding round. This massive investment values the company at $300 billion, making it the largest-ever fundraising session for a startup.

The money comes from a partnership with SoftBank Group, a major Japanese investment company. OpenAI said this funding will allow them to expand their AI research and build more advanced technology.

In a statement, OpenAI explained that the support from SoftBank will help them create AI systems that can drive scientific discoveries, improve personalized education, and boost human creativity. Their long-term goal is to develop AGI (artificial general intelligence)—a type of AI with human-like intelligence—that will benefit everyone.

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SoftBank’s Vision: Superhuman AI

SoftBank also shared its excitement about the partnership. The company revealed its mission to create Artificial superintelligence (ASI), which is even smarter than humans. SoftBank believes that OpenAI is the closest company to achieving this goal.

The Japanese firm will initially invest $10 billion, and depending on certain conditions, it plans to add $30 billion more by the end of the year.

According to SoftBank, creating AGI and ASI requires massive computing power, so they are investing heavily in OpenAI.

Growing User Base

OpenAI said they will use the new funds to expand their infrastructure and make even more powerful tools. The company revealed that 500 million people now use ChatGPT every week.

Becoming More Open

On the same day as the funding announcement, OpenAI revealed that it plans to build a more open AI model. This is a big change for the company, as it has always protected its closed, proprietary models.

OpenAI made this decision because it faces rising competition from rivals like Meta and DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company. These competitors are building open-source AI models, which allow developers to download and modify them. Many businesses and governments prefer open models because they offer more control over their data and technology.

Pressure from Elon Musk

OpenAI’s decision to become more open may also be linked to Elon Musk, one of its former investors. Musk has criticized OpenAI for becoming too closed and has called on the company to return to its original open-source mission.

Rival Competition

Meta’s Llama AI model, which is open-source, recently hit one billion downloads. Meanwhile, DeepSeek’s lower-cost R1 model, released in January, is shaking up the AI industry. These successes have put pressure on OpenAI to reconsider its closed approach.

Sam Altman’s Statement

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company had been considering this shift for a while but focused on other priorities. However, with growing competition, they now feel it’s the right time to make their model more open.

ChatGPT’s Popularity Explodes

OpenAI is also gaining massive attention for its new image-generation features in ChatGPT. Altman shared that this tool helped the company gain one million users in just one hour.

However, the new features became so popular that they overloaded OpenAI’s graphics processing units (GPUs), which power the AI, due to the heavy demand.