On Friday, OpenAI said it had raised $110 billion in capital at a pre-money valuation of $730 billion. This is the biggest private financing deal ever. Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank each put in $30 billion, and more investors are anticipated to join as the round goes on.
The purchase strengthens the broad strategic alliance between OpenAI and Amazon and strengthens the AI company’s ties to its major chip supplier, Nvidia. It also more than doubles the $40 billion OpenAI received in March 2025, which was the largest private tech fundraise on record at the time.
A Partnership With Amazon That Has Many Levels
According to a story by The Information, Amazon’s $50 billion promise starts with $15 billion up front and $35 billion more if OpenAI either goes public or hits certain artificial general intelligence criteria.
Along with the investment, there is a strategic collaboration that will last for several years. OpenAI’s enterprise platform, Frontier, will only be available through AWS, and the two firms will work together to develop a “Stateful Runtime Environment” for AI apps on Amazon Bedrock. OpenAI will also promise to use about 2 gigawatts of Trainium capacity through AWS infrastructure.
Over the next eight years, the businesses will add $100 billion to an existing $38 billion cloud computing deal. OpenAI will also cooperate with Amazon to create unique models that will power Amazon apps that customers can use.
”By combining OpenAI’s models with Amazon’s infrastructure and global reach, we can give businesses and users access to powerful AI on a large scale,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in a joint statement.
Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon, dubbed the transaction a long-term gamble. He said, “We’re excited not only that they chose to go big on our custom AI silicon (Trainium), but also that we have the chance to invest in the company and work with them over the long term.”
SoftBank And Nvidia Put More Money On The Line
SoftBank will put its $30 billion investment into three $10 billion tranches through SoftBank Vision Fund 2. The first close is set for April 2026, the second for July 2026, and the third for October 2026. With this investment, SoftBank will own about 13% of OpenAI, which is worth $64.6 billion.
Nvidia’s $30 billion promise takes the place of a previous letter of intent for up to $100 billion that was linked to a hardware deployment deal but was never signed. Nvidia will invest in OpenAI in exchange for equity, but OpenAI won’t have to buy Nvidia’s chips. OpenAI also said it is expanding its partnership with Nvidia to include 3 gigawatts of dedicated inference capacity and 2 gigawatts of training on Vera Rubin systems.
Amazon’s Two AI Plans
The transaction is surprising because Amazon has already put $8 billion into Anthropic, which is OpenAI’s main competitor, and it is Anthropic’s main cloud and training partner. The move shows that the biggest IT corporations are trying to protect themselves by getting direct access to more than one cutting-edge AI developer. They see this as a competitive need.
OpenAI announced that ChatGPT currently has more than 900 million users who use it every week and more than 50 million paying customers. Altman said that the company is now in “a new phase where frontier AI moves from research into daily use at global scale.”