OpenAI Secures Record $110 Billion Funding Round Backed By Amazon, Nvidia, & SoftBank
OpenAI has closed a new funding round that could total $110 billion, valuing the ChatGPT maker at $730 billion pre-money and potentially putting it on course for an IPO in the second half of the year, according to a new Financial Times report.
The three investors in the deal are Nvidia, Amazon, and SoftBank. People familiar with the deal say this opens the pathway to the public markets at the end of this year.
Breaking down funding numbers by strategic investors:
Amazon: $15 billion upfront, plus $35 billion later if OpenAI goes public or achieves AGI
Nvidia: $30 billion
SoftBank: $30 billion
Another $10 billion may come from sovereign wealth funds and other investors
The FT noted that the new funding round comes on top of the $40 billion already on OpenAI's balance sheet, giving the company more runway to rapidly expand and develop new models and AI infrastructure. OpenAI expects to remain unprofitable until 2030, when management forecasts it will turn free cash flow positive.
In a separate release, Amazon detailed its major multi-year partnership with OpenAI, centered on enterprise AI infrastructure, distribution, and custom model development.
Here are the highlights of the Amazon-OpenAI investment:
Amazon will invest $50 billion in OpenAI, with $15 billion upfront and another $35 billion later if certain conditions are met.
AWS and OpenAI will jointly build a "Stateful Runtime Environment" powered by OpenAI models and offered through Amazon Bedrock, aimed at helping customers run AI apps and agents with persistent context, memory, tool access, and compute.
AWS becomes the exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider for OpenAI Frontier, OpenAI's enterprise platform for building and managing teams of AI agents.
OpenAI will expand its AWS infrastructure commitment by $100 billion over 8 years, on top of an existing $38 billion agreement.
As part of that, OpenAI will use roughly 2 gigawatts of AWS Trainium capacity, spanning Trainium3 and future Trainium4 chips, to support Frontier, Stateful Runtime, and other advanced workloads.
OpenAI and Amazon will also develop custom OpenAI-based models for Amazon's customer-facing apps, giving Amazon teams another model option alongside its in-house Nova family.
"OpenAI and Amazon share a belief that AI should show up in ways that are practical and genuinely useful for people," OpenAI boss Sam Altman stated, adding, "Combining OpenAI's models with Amazon's infrastructure and global reach helps us put powerful AI into the hands of businesses and users at real scale."
Altman commented on today's announcement, saying, "As long as revenue keeps growing, the deals are not circular."
Well...
"As long as new investors keep coming, the Ponzi scheme won't unravel" - Bernie Madoff, maybe https://t.co/CZJRLTtAbk
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) February 27, 2026
Let's revisit our notes on the "circle jerk" AI vendor financing schemes as we've pointed out since last fall (read here & here).
Related:
The circle jerk keeps getting larger.