OpenAI completes $110 billion funding, the largest in history: Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank team up, valuation soars to $840 billion

OpenAI announces the completion of the largest single corporate financing in history, with joint investments from Amazon, NVIDIA, and SoftBank…raising its post-money valuation to over $840 billion. The funds will be used for AI infrastructure and next-generation model development.
(Background: Financial Times reports NVIDIA to invest $30 billion in OpenAI, replacing last year’s $10 billion partnership deal)
(Additional context: Amazon reportedly plans to invest over $10 billion in OpenAI to promote its own chips, Trainium, challenging NVIDIA’s dominance)

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• Three Investment Strategies
• OpenAI says it will burn through $600 billion by 2030
• The largest ever, and the next record might still be broken by it

On the evening of the 27th, OpenAI officially announced the completion of a $110 billion funding plan. This figure sets a new record for the largest single funding round in global corporate history, with a post-money valuation surpassing $840 billion.

Three Investment Strategies

The three main investors in this round are not just financial backers; each has clear strategic motives.

Amazon, $50 billion: The largest single investment in this round. Also announced was an expansion of AWS infrastructure agreements: in addition to the existing $38 billion cloud contract, an extra $100 billion over eight years for computing power.

In other words, Amazon is doing two things simultaneously: investing in OpenAI’s valuation and securing OpenAI as a long-term cloud computing tenant for AWS.

SoftBank, $30 billion: Masayoshi Son’s logic has remained unchanged since 2017: betting on the core platform of AI, holding enough shares to wait for market value to grow. SoftBank is already a long-term shareholder of OpenAI and a co-lead of the Stargate project.

NVIDIA, $30 billion: On the surface an investment, but more accurately a strategic alliance. OpenAI is one of the world’s largest GPU consumers, with a significant portion of its training and inference workloads running on NVIDIA’s H100 and Blackwell series chips.

Investing in OpenAI benefits NVIDIA financially through its key customer, while also tying the fates of both companies more closely together. This is an investment to “ensure the buyer doesn’t walk away.”

OpenAI says it will burn through $600 billion by 2030

Last week, OpenAI disclosed an updated target for compute spending: by 2030, it plans to invest approximately $600 billion in total compute capacity.

This number is nearly six times the total amount raised in this round. In other words, the $110 billion funding is not a complete coverage of OpenAI’s needs over the next four years but a strategic milestone. The Stargate project, AWS expansion agreements, and other undisclosed compute deployments will require ongoing capital infusion.

This ongoing funding need explains why OpenAI chose to raise this round at this time: taking advantage of high valuation and market enthusiasm to lock in funds first, then figure out deployment strategies later.

The largest ever, and the next record might still be broken by it

In terms of competitive landscape, this round has widened OpenAI’s capital gap with rivals. Anthropic’s last round was $30 billion, xAI’s was $20 billion, while AI investments by Google and Meta are mainly internal and not reflected in fundraising figures.

$110 billion — the largest single private funding round in history. The record holder is itself, and the next to break this record might also be itself. (Or Elon Musk’s SpaceX)