OpenAI recently raised $110 billion in financing. NVIDIA, Amazon, and SoftBank have all secured their spots on the investment "ship."

Tingyu, from Aofeisi, QbitAI | WeChat official account QbitAI

All of a sudden, OpenAI has secured the largest single check in the history of AI.

On the evening of February 27th, OpenAI announced a new round of financing of $110 billion. Among them, $30 billion came from SoftBank, $30 billion from NVIDIA, and $50 billion from Amazon. The pre - investment valuation was $730 billion.

This is also the largest single - round financing in the AI field to date.

Officially, this financing will be used to expand the construction of artificial intelligence infrastructure to accelerate the popularization of AI.

Altman also described the specific cooperation directions with the three companies on X:

NVIDIA: Responsible for the supply of underlying computing power. It will provide OpenAI with continuous and scalable training and inference capabilities around GPUs and next - generation accelerators;

Amazon: Provide cloud infrastructure and global deployment capabilities to support OpenAI's model delivery and commercial implementation in multi - regional and multi - industry scenarios;

SoftBank: It will mainly play the roles of capital and ecosystem. Through long - term capital support and industrial resource integration, it will promote OpenAI's expansion in a broader industrial system.

In addition, as an old shareholder of OpenAI, Microsoft is also involved.

The two parties issued a joint statement saying that the previous cooperation relationship remains unchanged. Microsoft Azure is still the exclusive cloud service provider for OpenAI API, and Microsoft has the exclusive license and access to the intellectual property rights in OpenAI's models and products.

At the same time, the three most critical AI resource lines of upstream computing power, cloud infrastructure, and long - term capital have been brought together at once.

One financing deal includes three giants

In this round of financing, Amazon is the most generous investor, investing $50 billion.

This investment will be made in stages: Amazon will first invest $15 billion, and in the next few months, when specific conditions are met, it will add another $35 billion.

As for these "specific conditions", some insiders said it is for OpenAI to "achieve AGI" or successfully go public.

There is also a special clause in the cooperation between OpenAI and Microsoft: once AGI is achieved, Microsoft will lose access to its technology.

In this agreement, OpenAI plans to develop a new "stateful runtime environment", and its models will run on Amazon's Bedrock platform in this environment.

OpenAI promises to consume large - scale cloud computing resources on the AWS platform, including about 2 gigawatts of Trainium chip computing power, to support Frontier, the stateful environment, and other advanced workloads.

In addition, the two parties will expand the $38 billion agreement signed in November last year. OpenAI will consume a total of about $100 billion in cloud computing resources on AWS in the next eight years.

Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon, also said: "Now, the two largest artificial intelligence labs in the world are both using Trainium extensively." Besides OpenAI, the other one is Anthropic.

Previously, Amazon had invested billions of dollars in Anthropic and built a $11 billion data center park in Indiana, specifically for training and running Anthropic's models, called "Project Rainier".

However, Amazon also said that the cooperation with OpenAI will not change its relationship with Anthropic.

The second investor, NVIDIA.

In September last year, there were rumors that NVIDIA would invest $100 billion in OpenAI. But in the following months, there were reports that the investment amount was smaller.

At that time, Jensen Huang specifically came out to refute the rumor that "NVIDIA will abandon OpenAI":

We will invest a large amount of money. I believe in OpenAI. The work they are doing is incredible.

Sure enough, here comes the $30 billion.

In this agreement, OpenAI promises to use 2 gigawatts of training capacity on NVIDIA's Vera Rubin system and an additional 3 gigawatts of computing resources (most likely in the form of GPUs) to run specific AI inference tasks.

In other words, NVIDIA is both a strategic investor in OpenAI and its chip supplier. It's like investing its own money to let OpenAI buy its own chips, which is another logic of "circular investment".

The third investor, SoftBank, invests $30 billion.

The official announcement shows that SoftBank's investment will be received in three installments in April, July, and October 2026.

Masayoshi Son, the chairman and CEO of SoftBank Group, said that SoftBank is confident in the continuous growth of OpenAI:

Through this additional investment, we will accelerate OpenAI's research and ecosystem expansion, and at the same time promote our own artificial intelligence strategy.

It is worth noting that some media said that SoftBank not only plays the role of an investor but also the role of a "matchmaker".

Insiders said that OpenAI is expected to receive about $10 billion in primary equity financing, and the relevant commitments will be finally determined within the next month. The investors include sovereign wealth funds and investment companies. It is speculated that these investors may be introduced through SoftBank.

The cooperation relationship with Microsoft remains unchanged, but seeks diversification

Next, let's talk about Microsoft, an old shareholder of OpenAI.

Microsoft is one of OpenAI's biggest supporters and its exclusive infrastructure partner. After the announcement of this round of financing, although there are many speculations from the outside world, OpenAI and Microsoft still strongly maintain their "core positions" in the latest statement:

The exclusive status of Azure: Microsoft Azure is still the exclusive cloud service provider for OpenAI's stateless API. OpenAI's first - party products (including Frontier) will continue to be hosted on Azure;

The business logic and revenue - sharing relationship remain unchanged: The existing revenue - sharing agreement is still valid. Even if OpenAI generates revenue on Amazon or Oracle's cloud, Microsoft can still "take a cut";

Exclusive intellectual property rights: Microsoft continues to have the exclusive license to the intellectual property rights of OpenAI's existing models and future products.

However, this round of financing is also proof that OpenAI is going beyond its long - term cooperation relationship with Microsoft and seeking business diversification.

The addition of Amazon is the best example. Amazon is Microsoft's main competitor in the cloud computing field. OpenAI's promise to add $100 billion in AWS consumption in the next eight years and its large - scale adoption of Amazon's self - developed Trainium 3/4 chips also show that OpenAI is not willing to put all its computing power eggs in the Azure basket.

One More Thing

By now, you may have realized that this is another typical "circular financing" logic.

NVIDIA is both a shareholder and the only "arms dealer" that can provide underlying computing power; while Amazon is both a new investor and OpenAI's future cloud service provider.

Simply put, the suppliers (NVIDIA/Amazon) invest money in the customer (OpenAI), and then the customer uses this money to buy the suppliers' chips or cloud services. For the suppliers, this money changes from "investment expenditure" to "operating income" on the balance sheet, which not only boosts the stock price but also locks in future market share.

It's quite a good deal.

Although there are many concerns in the outside world about this "circular financing" narrative, Altman said:

I understand everyone's concerns. All this makes sense only when new revenue flows into the entire artificial intelligence ecosystem.

OpenAI's previous round of financing was completed in March 2025, raising $40 billion, and the valuation reached $300 billion. At that time, it was the largest private financing in history.

With this round of financing and the original about $40 billion in cash on the books, OpenAI's available funds will increase to about $150 billion. The company expects to achieve positive free cash flow for the first time by 2030.

OpenAI really needs this capital and computing power. The latest data in February shows that the weekly active users of ChatGPT have exceeded 900 million, the monthly visits are about 5.72 billion, the number of individual subscribers exceeds 50 million, and the number of active enterprise customers exceeds 15,000.

Altman also said that he is devoting a lot of energy to obtaining more computing power to meet the demand for ChatGPT and other OpenAI products.

The competition among top artificial intelligence labs is still fierce. Not long ago, Anthropic received $30 billion from investors such as Microsoft and NVIDIA, and the post - investment valuation is aiming at $380 billion, enhancing its ability to compete with OpenAI.

Now that the ammunition is ready, let's see what amazing new models OpenAI will come up with using this huge amount of funds.

Reference links: [1]https://openai.com/index/continuing-microsoft-partnership[2]https://x.com/sama/status/2027386252555919386?s=20[3]https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/27/amazon-open-ai-cloud-jassy-altman.html[4]https://group.softbank/en/news/press/20260227

This article is from the WeChat official account "QbitAI" (ID: QbitAI). Author: Focus on cutting - edge technology. Republished by 36Kr with authorization.