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OpenAI secures another $110 billion in funding from Amazon, NVIDIA and SoftBank
OpenAI just announced a massive funding round of $110 billion, which is one of the biggest investment rounds in Silicon Valley history. The investors feature many of the usual suspects, including Amazon with $50 billion, NVIDIA with $30 billion and SoftBank with $30 billion. This investment brings OpenAI to a $730 billion valuation
"We’re super excited about this deal," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told CNBC. "AI is going to happen everywhere." That last statement seems more like a threat than a boast, but I digress.
Beyond the funding round, OpenAI has announced strategic partnerships with both NVIDIA and Amazon. This will involve Amazon Web Services (AWS) running OpenAI models for enterprise customers to "build generative AI applications and agents at production scale." It also names AWS as the exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider for OpenAI Frontier, which is an agentic enterprise platform.
OpenAI has also committed to consuming 2 gigawatts of Amazon's Trainium capacity, which is the company's custom-designed AI training accelerator. In other words, Amazon is spending a lot of money on OpenAI and then OpenAI will turn around and spend a lot of money with Amazon. The AI funding ouroboros continues.
It's also worth noting that Amazon's investment in OpenAI will be staggered. The funding begins with $15 billion, but the remaining $35 billion will only be invested when certain conditions are met.
Oddly, it's been reported that one condition is that OpenAI achieves artificial general intelligence. AGI is when AI evolves to or beyond human-level abilities, at which point the entire world turns into rainbows and everyone gets a pony. This could happen later this year, according to those bullish on the technology, or never, according to many researchers. Sam Altman said it was coming in 2025 but has since grown weary of the term.
The new partnership with NVIDIA evolves the long-standing collaboration between the two companies. OpenAI has pledged to consume 2 gig
