OpenAI’s $110 billion funding round draws investment from Amazon, Nvidia, SoftBank

Feb 27 (Reuters) – OpenAI said on Friday it is raising $110 billion in a blockbuster funding round that would value the ChatGPT maker at $840 billion, in a deal that signals the feverish pace of investment in artificial intelligence.

The funding round includes a $30 billion investment from SoftBank, $30 billion from Nvidia, and $50 billion from Amazon, and comes ahead of the AI startup’s expected mega-IPO later this year.

Big Tech companies and large tech investors such as SoftBank are racing to forge partnerships with OpenAI – which is spending heavily on data centers – betting that closer ties with the company would give them a competitive edge in the AI race.

Amazon will start with an initial $15 billion investment, followed by another $35 billion in the coming months when certain conditions are met.

Along with the investment, OpenAI and Amazon have also struck a deal in which OpenAI will utilize 2 gigawatts of computing capacity powered by Amazon’s in-house Trainium chips, the companies said.

Amazon’s cloud computing platform, AWS, will also be the exclusive third-party cloud provider for OpenAI Frontier, the ChatGPT maker’s enterprise platform for building, deploying and managing AI agents.

The partnership does not change OpenAI’s existing relationship with Microsoft. Microsoft Azure still remains the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI’s APIs that provide access to OpenAI’s models, the companies said.

OpenAI’s first party products will continue to be hosted on Azure, and Microsoft holds its exclusive license and access to intellectual property across OpenAI models and products.

It was not immediately clear whether Nvidia’s $30 billion investment replaced its earlier commitment announced in September under which Nvidia would invest up to $100 billion in the startup.

OpenAI and Nvidia did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for clarification.

(Reporting by Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru; Editing by Arun Koyyur and Chizu Nomiyama )