OpenAI completes the largest financing in history: $122 billion, with a valuation of $852 billion

On March 31 local time in the United States, OpenAI announced the completion of the largest private equity financing round in Silicon Valley's history, with a total amount of $122 billion. After the financing, its valuation reached $852 billion.

This round of financing was led by three strategic partners, Amazon, NVIDIA, and SoftBank, which collectively promised to invest $110 billion. Amazon alone promised as much as $5 billion, but the payment will be made in two steps: $1.5 billion will be directly credited in this round, and the remaining $3.5 billion will be paid only after OpenAI completes its IPO or achieves what OpenAI defines as "Artificial General Intelligence" (AGI), which means AI can independently perform most human jobs with economic value.

SoftBank co-led the investment with institutions such as Andreessen Horowitz and D.E. Shaw. Many institutions, including Sequoia Capital, Thrive Capital, BlackRock, and Blackstone, followed up. Microsoft also participated, but the specific amount was not disclosed. In addition to equity financing, OpenAI also expanded its existing revolving credit line to approximately $4.7 billion, supported by a syndicate of more than a dozen global banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley. This credit line has not been used yet.

The most notable new move in this round of financing is that OpenAI opened subscriptions to individual investors for the first time, raising over $3 billion through three bank channels. Meanwhile, OpenAI announced that it will be included in several ETFs managed by "Cathie Wood" Cathy Wood's ARK Invest. Its flagship product, the ARK Innovation ETF, with a scale of approximately $6 billion, will have an approximately 3% exposure to OpenAI. This is also the first time the fund has included private company equity in its holdings. Sarah Friar, OpenAI's Chief Financial Officer, said that allowing more ordinary people to share the financial returns of the AI era is part of the company's mission: "It's not just the popularization of technology but also the popularization of financial benefits."

01 900 million users and monthly revenue of $2 billion, but still in the red

Judging from business data, OpenAI's growth rate is indeed extraordinary. ChatGPT's revenue exceeded $1 billion in less than a year after its launch, reaching $1 billion per quarter by the end of 2024. Now, its monthly revenue has risen to $2 billion, four times the growth rate of Internet giants such as Google and Meta during the same period.

The user base is also huge: ChatGPT has over 900 million weekly active users and more than 50 million paid subscribers. Its monthly web visits and mobile sessions are six times that of the second-largest AI application, and the user usage time is four times the total of all other AI applications. The proportion of enterprise revenue currently exceeds 40% and is expected to be on par with consumer revenue by the end of 2026.

After the launch of OpenAI's latest flagship model, GPT - 5.4, the engagement in intelligent workflows has continuously broken records. The API processes over 15 billion tokens per minute. The weekly active users of the programming assistant Codex increased five - fold in three months, with a month - on - month growth rate of over 70%. The usage of the search function nearly tripled within a year, and the annualized revenue of the advertising pilot project exceeded $100 million in less than six weeks. However, despite its large scale, OpenAI is still operating at a loss and has not yet achieved profitability.

In terms of strategic direction, OpenAI is concentrating its resources on one thing: creating an "AI super - app" for developers and enterprise users, integrating the capabilities of ChatGPT, Codex, search, and agents into a single product interface. The underlying judgment is that when the model's capabilities reach a certain level, what users really need is no longer a smarter tool but a unified system that can act directly across applications, data, and workflows. The large user base accumulated on the consumer side will also become a natural entry point into the enterprise market. To focus on this goal, the company recently shut down the short - video app Sora and some other projects, narrowing its scope of operations.

At the infrastructure level, OpenAI has built a computing system spanning multiple cloud platforms, including Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Oracle, and CoreWeave. On the chip side, it covers various architectures such as NVIDIA, AMD, and Cerebras, and is jointly researching and developing self - developed chips with Broadcom. OpenAI regards computing power as the most core strategic asset of the entire system, with a closed - loop logic: stronger computing power trains smarter models, smarter models lead to better products, better products drive more users and revenue, and the revenue is then reinvested in computing power.

02 Countdown to listing, but competitors are not idle

After the completion of this round of financing, the expectation that OpenAI will launch an IPO within 2026 has significantly increased. It is reported that OpenAI has had informal contacts with several Wall Street investment banks, and its CEO, Sam Altman, has also been meeting with major investment banks. The company has also recruited several financial executives for the listing, including Sarah Friar, who led the listings of Square and NextDoor, as the CFO, and the former Chief Accounting Officer of Block and the former CFO of DocuSign to handle investor relations.

Currently, the market expects that OpenAI's earliest listing window will be in the fourth quarter of 2026, and the listing location may be the NASDAQ. The exact time is still uncertain. Before the listing, OpenAI also needs to complete the legal transition from a non - profit to a for - profit structure and disclose its full audited financial data to the market for the first time.

Part of the pressure driving OpenAI to accelerate its listing comes from its competitors. Anthropic is also discussing an IPO as early as the end of 2026, with an expected financing scale of over $60 billion. It has already hired the law firm Wilson Sonsini to start the listing preparation work.

OpenAI's management is worried that if Anthropic goes public first, it will absorb a large amount of pent - up demand from retail investors for AI stocks, reducing the market enthusiasm for its own IPO. Google has no current plan for an independent listing, but its Gemini series of models continue to put pressure on ChatGPT, posing direct competition in both the enterprise and consumer markets.

In addition, it is reported that the new entity formed by merging SpaceX and xAI under Elon Musk will submit IPO documents as early as June this year, with a valuation possibly exceeding $1.75 trillion. If the three AI giants go public intensively in the same year, it will be the most intense liquidity test in the technology stock market in decades.

This article is from "Tencent Technology", translated by Wuji, edited by Xiaojing, and published by 36Kr with authorization.