OpenAI's $110B Raise: When Your Valuation Needs Its Own Area Code

OpenAI just casually announced a funding round worth $110 billion, landing a pre-money valuation of $730 billion. Nvidia and SoftBank each chipped in a cool $30 billion, while Amazon strolled in and dropped a casual $50 billion on the table, because when you're playing with monopoly money, you might as well go all-in.

ChatGPT is now flexing over 900 million weekly active users and 50 million paying subscribers, which is basically the entire population of Europe deciding to chat with a robot. Not to be outdone, the Codex AI coding tool has seen its weekly user base more than triple since January to 1.6 million, proving that developers will use anything to avoid writing boilerplate code themselves.

The new partnerships are, of course, "strategic." The Amazon deal is all about turbocharging AI for enterprises and startups. The expanded Nvidia collab secures dedicated inference and training capacity on next-gen hardware, because you need the absolute best GPUs when you're trying to teach a superintelligence to be polite.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated, 'We’re pushing the frontier across infrastructure, research, and products to make AI more capable, reliable, and broadly useful.' He called the investors 'long-term partners who share our ambition to turn real scientific progress into systems that deliver meaningful benefits for people at global scale.' In other words, they found some friends with very, very deep pockets who also like playing god.

Additional investors are expected to join the round, because who wouldn't want a ticket to this particular rocket ship? The raise also boosts the OpenAI Foundation's stake to over $180 billion, massively expanding its philanthropic capacity in areas like health and AI resilience, because once you've solved for artificial general intelligence, you might as well tackle mortality and system failures for fun.

In a separate statement, OpenAI and Microsoft confirmed that the new investors don't impact their existing relationship. Microsoft maintains its exclusive license and access to OpenAI's intellectual property, quietly reminding everyone in the room that they got in at the seed round.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang added, 'Artificial intelligence is the most consequential technology of our time, and OpenAI is at the forefront. We have been privileged to partner with OpenAI since its earliest days.' This is a bit like the shovel salesman expressing his deep, philosophical partnership with the gold rush.

The $730 billion valuation positions OpenAI for what could be the largest US tech IPO in history, utterly dwarfing landmarks like Meta's $104 billion debut. The company has not yet filed for an IPO, presumably because their lawyers are still trying to figure out how to spell numbers that big.