OpenAI is set to complete a $40 billion fund-raising deal that nearly doubles the high-profile company’s valuation from just four months ago.
The new fund-raising round, led by the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, values OpenAI at $300 billion, according to three people with knowledge of the deal who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The deal would make OpenAI one of the most valuable private companies in the world, along with the rocket company SpaceX and ByteDance, the maker of TikTok.
SoftBank will invest up to $40 billion in OpenAI and will syndicate the deal, with other investors providing about a quarter of the total funds, the people said. That figure would be a $15 billion increase from a total that was discussed one week ago.
CNBC reported earlier on the investment talks.
The deal shows that investors are still bullish on artificial intelligence market leaders like OpenAI, despite the U.S. financial markets’ tumbling late last month after a Chinese company called DeepSeek unveiled rival technology.
In December, DeepSeek said it had built one of the world’s most powerful A.I. systems using far fewer computer chips than many experts thought possible. The prevailing wisdom had been that only companies like OpenAI — which spent tens of billions of dollars training their A.I. technologies using tens of thousands of specialized chips — could build the most powerful systems.
DeepSeek built its technology with only 2,000 chips and spent only about $6 million in raw computing power.
But many in the field believe that the companies with access to the most computing power will continue to lead the market. Late last month, OpenAI and SoftBank joined Oracle in an agreement to spend $100 billion erecting new computer data centers in the United States that will be used to build A.I. President Trump announced the deal on his second day in office.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied the suit’s claims.)
