OpenAI, the global leader in artificial intelligence and developer of ChatGPT, recently announced the completion of a massive $110 billion funding round. This transaction is not only the largest financing round in the company’s history but also pushes its pre-money valuation to an astonishing $730 billion. Notably, this valuation does not include the funds raised in this round, meaning that upon completion of the financing, OpenAI’s overall valuation has jumped to approximately $840 billion.
This funding round attracted massive investments from several technology behemoths. U.S. e-commerce and cloud computing leader Amazon (AMZN) invested $50 billion, marking the largest single-company investment in its history. Meanwhile, the “supreme AI chip leader” Nvidia (NVDA) and SoftBank Group each contributed $30 billion.
These investments are not merely financial transactions; they are accompanied by deep strategic collaborations. As part of the agreement, OpenAI will adopt Amazon’s self-developed AI ASIC computing chip, Trainium, and will collaborate with Amazon to custom-develop large AI models for its own artificial intelligence engineering team. More critically, OpenAI will invest an additional $100 billion into Amazon Web Services (AWS) over the next eight years, signifying a substantial upgrade to an agreement signed between the parties last year.
OpenAI’s latest funding round, along with competitor Anthropic’s recent $30 billion deal, collectively outlines a unique “circular financing” model currently prevalent in the AI sector. In this model, leading AI startups secure massive funds from the very tech giants that also provide them with chips and cloud computing services, thereby ensuring their massive computational infrastructure needs are met. The risk inherent in this tight coupling is that if future actual demand for AI computing power fails to meet current high expectations, it could amplify losses and potentially lead to the bursting of the “AI bubble.”
Despite this, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman remains optimistic about the company’s prospects. He emphasized that this model only makes sense when new revenues can continuously flow into the entire AI ecosystem. He himself is primarily focused on securing larger-scale AI computing infrastructure to meet the growing demands of its AI application products.
For global stock markets, the fervent investor enthusiasm for the “artificial intelligence investment theme” in recent years – the so-called “AI conviction” – has become one of the core drivers fueling the bull market. Institutions like Bank of America and Vanguard believe that the global AI arms race is still in its early stages, and the investment cycle is far from over.
