OpenAI has finalized a $6.6 billion funding round from investors who valued the company at $157 billion — the latest in a series of dramatic and sometimes polarizing moves for the ChatGPT maker.
The deal anoints the artificial intelligence company as one of the most highly valued start-ups of all time, suggesting its backers expect OpenAI’s chatbot to become much more widely used and to haul in huge profits. Yet the new financing comes on the heels of the surprise resignation of OpenAI’s chief technology officer, Mira Murati, who had led work on the company’s products, the latest in a string of executive departures from a company that has struggled with internal tensions over safety and the leadership of CEO Sam Altman.
OpenAI’s new investors include chipmaker Nvidia, MGX, a new technology investment company from the United Arab Emirates, and SoftBank, the Japanese firm known for funneling exorbitant sums into WeWork and Uber as their valuations ballooned before later contracting. Existing investors also participated, including Microsoft and New York investment firms Tiger Global Management and Thrive Capital, which led the round.
OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit dedicated to inventing superintelligent AI that would benefit all humanity. But it set up a commercial division in 2019 and took investment from Microsoft and others, saying it was the only way to secure the resources needed to fuel AI’s insatiable need for semiconductor chips and the energy to power data centers.
The company has raised multiple rounds of funding since it launched ChatGPT in late 2022 — including billions from Microsoft, which became a key partner — as a way to offer employees and early investors a chance to cash out by selling their shares, and as a means of bringing in fresh capital.
OpenAI’s new funding marks a new phase for the San Francisco-based artificial intelligence, which initially positioned itself as a counterweight against the dangers of leaving superintelligent AI in the hands of a single company or oppressive foreign government. The commercial race to dominate generative AI, set in motion by OpenAI’s decision to release ChatGPT, has in the view of critics and some early employees increasingly crowded out debate around corporate concentration of power or investment from authoritarian regimes.
This is a developing story and will be updated.