With this new investment, SoftBank is set to usurp Microsoft as OpenAI’s biggest backer.
OpenAI is reportedly in talks to raise $40bn, taking the nine-year-old start-up to a $340bn valuation. The new funding round would more than double OpenAI’s previous valuation just four months ago, when the ChatGPT-maker was pegged at $157bn after a $6.6bn capital raise.
SoftBank is set to lead the latest funding round, the Wall Street Journal – who broke the story – reported. While, earlier last week, the Financial Times reported that the Japanese investment firm would be pumping between $15bn to $25bn into OpenAI.
With the new multi-billion dollar investment, SoftBank will usurp Microsoft (who has invested $14bn into the AI start-up) as OpenAI’s biggest investor.
According to CNBC – who pegged the latest valuation at $340bn – a part of the investment could be used by OpenAI for Stargate, a $500bn joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle, MGX and SoftBank introduced by US president Donald Trump last week. Meanwhile, SoftBank will commit a separate $15bn to the joint-venture, sources told news outlets.
SoftBank was also a leading investor in OpenAI at the company’s last funding round in October 2024. The funding round was led by venture capital firm Thrive Capital and included other big name investors such as Nvidia, Fidelity, Khosla Ventures and Microsoft. While Apple reportedly dropped out of the round just days prior.
However, OpenAI, which is credited with bringing generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) products to the mainstream, is facing a new competitor from China. DeepSeek has made headlines over the last two weeks with its new R1 reasoning model showcasing capabilities on a par with ChatGPT, while taking a fraction of its cost to train its model.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who praised DeepSeek for its “impressive” and cheap reasoning model, has since gone on the offensive, accusing the Chinese start-up of using OpenAI’s models to train R1.
Earlier this week, OpenAI claimed to have evidence that DeepSeek ‘distilled’ or leveraged outputs ChatGPT, into its smaller model, reducing costs and latency.
Meanwhile, Microsoft has joined in with OpenAI’s investigation to look into whether DeepSeek obtained the start-up’s technology in an unauthorised manner.
Recently, OpenAI launched a preview of its Operator AI agent, a model which can interact with a webpage independently. According to the company, Operator can handle a variety of “repetitive browser tasks”, such as filling out forms, ordering groceries and even creating memes.
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