OpenAI, an AI giant, announced that it has completed its latest round of fundraising, raising $122 billion at a valuation of $852 billion, setting the highest record ever for the private markets. The round was led by Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank, and is seen as the most important capital deployment for the company prior to its public listing (IPO).
The largest private placement in history—OpenAI rewrites venture capital history
On Tuesday, OpenAI announced it has completed its latest funding round, raising $122 billion in total. After the financing, the company’s valuation reached $852 billion, setting a record for the largest single round of funding ever in the global private markets. This figure is three times the size of the previous second-largest record, and is six times higher than any deal before 2026, with the single-round amount already surpassing the total of the previous top five funding rounds.
The announcement said the funding will be used mainly to purchase AI chips, expand data center infrastructure, and recruit top talent worldwide.
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Participants in this round of financing include companies in the technology industry and financial institutions. Amazon invested about $50 billion and simultaneously expanded its AWS computing power procurement commitment to $100 billion; Nvidia invested about $30 billion, and OpenAI’s model training and inference architecture still centers on Nvidia GPUs; SoftBank invested about $30 billion, as well as other funds from a $40 billion loan; Microsoft, as OpenAI’s long-term partner, also participated in this round of investment.
In addition, dozens of top institutions also took part, including a16z (Andreessen Horowitz), ARK Invest (Ark Investment), funds under BlackRock, Blackstone, Fidelity, and others.
Notably, OpenAI is also opening up participation for retail investors through bank channels this time. It announced that its shares will be included in multiple ETFs under ARK Invest, allowing more everyday investors to indirectly hold shares of this yet-to-be-listed company, with an expected fundraising size of about $3 billion.
In addition, OpenAI is expanding its revolving credit facility to about $4.7 billion, supported by banks including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citibank, and Morgan Stanley. The facility has not yet been utilized.
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Monthly revenue reaches $2 billion, user base nearly hits one billion
TechCrunch describes OpenAI’s announcement as more like an “S-1 registration statement,” with long sections emphasizing data such as compute costs, annualized revenue, and market size.
The company said its monthly revenue is $2 billion, with annualized revenue of about $24 billion. Its growth rate is four times faster than that of major tech giants from the internet era of the time, such as Alphabet and Meta.
In terms of user scale, ChatGPT’s weekly active users have already exceeded 900 million, paid subscription users are over 50 million, and it ranks as the champion of AI on both the web and mobile platforms. Usage of the search feature has tripled within a year. The advertising pilot program launched in less than six weeks, and annual recurring revenue (ARR) has already surpassed $100 million—opening up an entirely new path to commercialization for the company.
The enterprise-side business is also performing strongly. It currently accounts for more than 40% of total revenue, and is expected to be on par with the consumer side by the end of 2026. OpenAI’s API processes more than 15 billion tokens per minute, and Codex, the programming agent tool, has more than 2 million weekly active users, growing fivefold within three months.
Market analysis: Overvalued, long-term losses as a hidden concern
Despite this, OpenAI’s financial situation remains widely questioned. KOL Aakash Gupta in the PM field estimates that OpenAI’s expected loss this year could be as high as $14 billion, burning $150 million per day. Compared with an annualized revenue of about $24 billion based on a $852 billion valuation, the price-to-earnings multiple reaches 35x. However, this company has never achieved profitability:
Internal projections indicate that this $122 billion is only enough to support OpenAI’s operating needs for about 18 to 24 months; afterward, they will have to raise funds again.
At the same time, as Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank are the three major investors and key infrastructure suppliers, this capital may flow back to them in the form of cloud contract fees and chip procurement costs, and may not necessarily be used to scale up or innovate. Not to mention Amazon’s $35 billion commitment is also conditional: OpenAI must complete an IPO or deliver an AGI product by the end of 2028, otherwise the funding would not be provided.
(Before burning through a trillion dollars—can OpenAI turn ChatGPT into a cash cow?)
Behind the capital narrative: public-market warming before the IPO
Overall, analysts generally believe that the significance of this round of financing goes beyond simply raising capital. OpenAI is using this round to establish a public-market narrative, strengthen the valuation anchor ahead of the IPO, and send a clear signal to potential public-market investors: the next generation of AI infrastructure will be led by OpenAI, and the scale of this wealth-creation event could be unprecedented in human business history.
This article, “OpenAI raises $122 billion with a $852 billion valuation—does this money only last for a year of burning?” first appeared in Lianxin News ABMedia.
