OpenAI raises $110 billion in largest ever funding round in history
Amazon leads with $50 billion, followed by NVIDIA with $30 billion
Sam Altman explains what investment means for OpenAI and partners
A couple of hours ago, Sam Altman announced to the world that OpenAI had just “raised a $110 billion round of funding from Amazon, NVIDIA, and SoftBank.” For Elon Musk and ChatGPT detractors baying for Sam Altman’s blood, with ominous predictions circulating on how OpenAI will go bankrupt by 2027, this must be a punch in the gut – for now.
SurveyFor Sam Altman and his team at OpenAI, needless to say this is great news. But there’s no time to bask in this momentary win, with this massive cash infusion, as there’s serious work to be done ahead. “We are grateful for the support from our partners, and have a lot of work to do to bring you the tools you deserve,” Altman wrote on his X.com account.
According to CNBC, the $110 billion funding round is split like so – Amazon has pumped in $50 billion, with NVIDIA and SoftBank both committing $30 billion each. The current funding round for OpenAI isn’t over yet, as more investors are expected to invest in the ChatGPT maker, according to reports.
This appears to be the largest private funding round of any startup or company in history. The cash infusion has taken OpenAI’s value to somewhere between $730 billion and $840 billion, depending on whom you ask, which is still a significant jump from the $500 billion valuation from October 2025.
Amazon’s $50 billion investment into OpenAI is expected to happen in two stages, where $15 billion is infused immediately and the remaining $35 billion expected in the coming months, contingent on certain conditions. Sam Altman tweeted OpenAI’s excitement on partnering with Amazon “to bring a new generation of products to market, especially around new enterprise products like the stateful runtime environment.”
Altman also confirmed that OpenAI will make use of Amazon’s Tranium AI chips for ChatGPT’s compute infrastructure with 2 gigawatts of capacity. In return, OpenAI is expected to expand its existing $38 billion deal with AWS with $100 billion over the next 8 years. AWS will also become an exclusive third-party cloud provider for Frontier, OpenAI’s enterprise platform.
What happens to OpenAI’s exclusivity deal with Microsoft Azure? Sam Altman was quick to allay any fears on that regard, tweeting how OpenAI continues to have “a great relationship with Microsoft.” And how the ChatGPT maker’s “stateless API will remain exclusive to Azure,” and they will continue to build out much more capacity on Microsoft’s Azure cloud.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang recently sent tongues wagging when he appeared to back track on the chip maker’s commitment to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI – which was initially reported back in September 2025. Whether the current $30 billion investment from NVIDIA is part of that $100 billion overall package isn’t clear right now. What is clear is that Sam Altman needs NVIDIA, even when he’s courting Amazon on top of Microsoft.
“NVIDIA has long been one of our most important partners, and their chips are the foundation of AI computing,” Altman wrote on his X.com handle. “We are grateful for their continued trust in us, and excited to run their systems in AWS. Their upcoming generations should be great.”
In case you were wondering, ChatGPT now has over 900 million weekly active users (of which 100 million are in India) and more than 50 million consumer subscribers, according to latest reports. Surely this fresh round of funding will only help OpenAI and Sam Altman get those ChatGPT numbers up even more, right?
Also read: OpenAI boss Sam Altman wants students not to rely on parents for career advice, here’s why
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Jayesh Shinde
Executive Editor at Digit. Technology journalist since Jan 2008, with stints at Indiatimes.com and PCWorld.in. Enthusiastic dad, reluctant traveler, weekend gamer, LOTR nerd, pseudo bon vivant. View Full Profile
