OpenAI Closes $122B Raise at $852B Value as AI Capex Surge Accelerates
OpenAI closed a $122 billion funding round at an $852 billion post-money valuation, underscoring how aggressively investors are still backing the buildout of AI models, chips and data center capacity.
OpenAI said in a blog post on Tuesday that the round was anchored by Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank, with continued participation from Microsoft and a long list of institutional investors.
The financing marks a sharp step-up even from OpenAI’s already breakneck capital raising over the past 18 months. In October 2024, OpenAI said it had raised $6.6 billion at a $157 billion post-money valuation, and in March 2025 it announced another $40 billion round at a $300 billion post-money valuation.
In late February 2026, the company had already disclosed $110 billion of new investment at a $730 billion pre-money valuation, indicating Tuesday’s announcement represents the formal close of an enlarged round rather than a fresh process launched from scratch.
OpenAI framed the new raise as fuel for a broader push to become the infrastructure layer for AI, spanning consumer products, enterprise software, developer tools and compute.
In its announcement, the company said ChatGPT has more than 900 million weekly active users and over 50 million subscribers, while enterprise now accounts for more than 40% of revenue. It also said revenue has climbed to $2 billion per month and that its API platform now processes more than 15 billion tokens per minute.
A central theme of the announcement was compute. OpenAI said it is expanding across multiple cloud and chip partners rather than relying on a narrower group of providers, naming Microsoft, Oracle, AWS, CoreWeave (NASDAQ: CRWV) and Google Cloud on the infrastructure side, and Nvidia, AMD, AWS Trainium, Cerebras and a Broadcom-linked in-house chip effort on the silicon side. It also said it expanded its revolving credit facility to about $4.7 billion, up from the $4 billion revolving line it established in October 2024.
That emphasis on infrastructure puts OpenAI’s fundraise squarely in the middle of a wider financing boom around AI capacity. Earlier this week, Mistral disclosed an $830 million debt financing to support a data center near Paris with 13,800 Nvidia GB300 GPUs and 44 megawatts of powered capacity. On Tuesday, CoreWeave announced an $8.5 billion delayed-draw term loan facility to keep expanding its AI cloud platform, a deal Reuters said brought the company’s debt and equity raised over the prior 12 months to roughly $28 billion.
The OpenAI round also shows how strategic investors are increasingly underwriting the AI stack, not just placing passive venture bets. Bloomberg reported that Amazon agreed to invest $50 billion, while Nvidia and SoftBank each committed $30 billion, with part of Amazon’s investment contingent on OpenAI going public or hitting an artificial-general-intelligence milestone.
Separately, Reuters reported last week that SoftBank had lined up a $40 billion bridge loan to support further OpenAI investment and general corporate purposes, highlighting how the company’s backers are themselves borrowing heavily to stay in the race.
Tuesday’s announcement also broadened the ownership story. OpenAI said it raised more than $3 billion from individual investors through bank channels and that it will be included in several ARK Invest exchange-traded funds. That adds a retail angle to what has otherwise been a capital-intensive contest dominated by hyperscalers, sovereign-backed funds and major institutional investors.
The size of the raise suggests that, despite ongoing questions about profitability, competitive pressure and the sustainability of AI spending, capital markets are still rewarding companies that can claim scale in users, revenue and compute access.
Reuters reported Tuesday that Big Tech’s planned AI infrastructure spending could reach $635 billion in 2026, even as higher energy costs threaten to test that buildout. Against that backdrop, OpenAI’s latest financing looks less like an isolated venture round than another marker in the transformation of AI from a software story into a full-blown infrastructure and capital-markets arms race.
