A $110 billion capital infusion from Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank positions OpenAI at a $730 billion pre-money valuation, marking one of the largest private funding rounds ever recorded. The ChatGPT maker announced the financing on Friday as it prepares for an expected public offering later this year.
Amazon leads the investment with $50 billion committed through a structured arrangement that begins with an initial $15 billion payment. The remaining $35 billion will follow when specific performance milestones are met in coming months.
Nvidia and SoftBank each contributed $30 billion to the round. The fresh capital arrives as OpenAI targets roughly $600 billion in total computing spending through 2030, familiar with company planning. Competition has intensified from rivals including Anthropic's Claude chatbot and Google's Gemini models.
Alongside its financial commitment, Amazon secured exclusive third-party cloud distribution rights for OpenAI Frontier, the enterprise platform for building and running AI agents unveiled earlier this month. AWS will serve as the sole external cloud provider for Frontier while OpenAI's first-party products continue running on Microsoft Azure.
OpenAI will use two gigawatts of computing capacity powered by Amazon's proprietary Trainium AI chips under expanded partnership terms. Separately, OpenAI's expanded collaboration with Nvidia includes 3 gigawatts of dedicated inference capacity and 2 gigawatts of training capacity on Nvidia's upcoming Vera Rubin systems.
Custom model development forms another pillar of the Amazon collaboration. Engineering teams will work together to create specialized AI systems for powering customer-facing applications across Amazon's e-commerce ecosystem.
Microsoft retains exclusive licensing rights to OpenAI's intellectual property across models and products despite the new Amazon partnership.
"Our stateless API will remain exclusive to Azure," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed in a statement Friday.
User metrics released alongside the funding announcement show ChatGPT now serves more than 900 million weekly active users globally. The platform counts over 50 million consumer subscribers and nine million paying business customers.
Codex, OpenAI's AI coding tool, has seen its weekly user base more than triple since January to reach 1.6 million developers. January and February are tracking to become the strongest months for new subscriber growth in company history according to internal projections.
Additional investors may join the financing round as it progresses beyond the initial three backers announced Friday.
