Inside OpenAI’s Massive $40B Funding Round Led by Japan’s SoftBank

OpenAI said Monday it has secured an additional $40 billion in funding to support research and development, as the tech powerhouse looks to strengthen its lead in the artificial intelligence sector.

Japanese conglomerate SoftBank led the funding round, as well as contributions from other investors, including longtime partner Microsoft,  OpenAI said in a blog post. Decrypt has reached out to learn more.

The announcement comes just days after OpenAI’s rival xAI acquired the X social media platform, owned by Elon Musk, a vocal critic of OpenAI CEO and co-founder Sam Altman.

“Today we’re announcing new funding—$40 billion at a $300 billion post-money valuation, which enables us to push the frontiers of AI research even further, scale our compute infrastructure, and deliver increasingly powerful tools for the 500 million people who use ChatGPT every week,” OpenAI said.

OpenAI now stands just behind Musk’s SpaceX, valued at $350 billion. OpenAI was already considered a “unicorn,” a designation for private companies valued at over $1 billion.

Although he didn’t mention the funding round, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X Monday that ChatGPT added two million users over the past five days.

The spike in usage follows a significant upgrade to ChatGPT’s image-generation capabilities. The tool proved so resource-intensive that Altman asked users on X to slow down usage, saying it was “melting OpenAI’s GPUs.”

OpenAI praised SoftBank, calling the firm—led by Masayoshi Son—a leader in scaling transformative technologies. 

In January, OpenAI partnered with Oracle and SoftBank to launch the Stargate Project, a $500 billion initiative to construct AI data centers across the United States over the next four years. 

“Their support will help us continue building AI systems that drive scientific discovery, enable personalized education, enhance human creativity, and pave the way toward AGI that benefits all of humanity,” they said.

Edited by Sebastian Sinclair