OpenAI just announced a massive funding round of $110 billion, which is one of the biggest investment rounds in Silicon Valley history. The investors feature many of the usual suspects, including Amazon with $50 billion, NVIDIA with $30 billion and SoftBank with $30 billion. This investment brings OpenAI to a $730 billion valuation.
Amazon is investing $50 billion and striking a deal that includes custom models for it to use with Alexa. AWS will be a third-party provider of OpenAI Frontier, its enterprise-facing platform for building, deploying, and managing AI agents that will run on Amazon's Trainium chips. Amazon is investing just $15 billion up front, with the additional $35 billion being delivered as certain milestones are met.
The round was led by SoftBank, with significant participation from Microsoft, Thrive Capital, and several sovereign wealth funds from the Middle East and Asia-Pacific. It arrives at a moment when enterprise AI spending has hit an all-time high globally, with Gartner projecting that worldwide AI software spending will surpass $297 billion in 2025, a 32% increase year-over-year.
