OpenAI has announced new funding of $40 billion at a post-money valuation of $300 billion. This investment will support the company in advancing AI research, expanding compute infrastructure, and delivering tools to the 500 million people who use ChatGPT each week.
The funding round includes a partnership with SoftBank Group. With SoftBank’s support, OpenAI aims to accelerate the development of AI systems that foster scientific discovery, enable personalised education, enhance human creativity, and move closer to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI) that benefits humanity.
AGI refers to a computing platform with human-level intelligence. SoftBank stated in a recent release that it is on a mission to realise Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) that surpasses human intelligence, and that OpenAI is the partner closest to achieving that goal.
SoftBank is to pump $10 billion into OpenAI to start, and $30 billion more by the end of this year, pending certain conditions.
The funding news came the same day OpenAI announced it was building a more open generative AI model as it faces growing competition in the open-source space from rival DeepSeek and Meta.
