In a shocking announcement on Friday, OpenAI said it had lined up a staggering $110 billion in new funding from three of the most powerful players in the tech industry, Amazon, NVIDIA, and SoftBank, giving the AI firm a pre-money valuation of $730 billion ahead of what could be a blockbuster IPO later this year.
The deal doubles the size of OpenAI’s last funding round, which raised a record-setting $40 billion in March 2025. This time, the stakes are bigger, the partners are more strategic, and the implications for the AI industry can only be best explained as they come.
Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank are Betting Big
CEO Sam Altman did not mince words when describing what this moment means for the company. “We’re super excited about this deal,” he told CNBC’s Squawk Box Friday morning.
Amazon is leading this charge by investing $50 billion in this round ($15 billion upfront, and the other $35 billion will be invested after satisfactory progress. Both NVIDIA and SoftBank are committing $30 billion each. Other investors are not exempt from this fundraising and are welcome to join as the project progresses.
“AI is going to happen everywhere. It’s transforming the whole economy, and the world needs a lot of collective computing power to meet the demand,” he said.
For Altman, this is not just a fundraiser. It is a declaration that OpenAI is ready to play at a scale no private AI company has ever attempted.
Why Invest So Much?
The trio of investors is not writing these checks out of charity. Amazon Web Services (AWS) automatically replaces OpenAI Frontier as the exclusive third-party cloud distribution partner for OpenAI’s enterprise solution for deploying AI agents. Furthermore, Amazon (through AWS) will benefit from an extra $100 billion over a period of eight years, in ...
