US-based AI company OpenAI has raised $40bn in a new funding round, propelling its valuation to a post-money total of $300bn.
The funding round was led by Japanese multinational investment holding company SoftBank Group, with participation from existing investors including Microsoft, Coatue Management, Thrive Capital, and Altimeter Capital.
Go deeper with GlobalData
In a statement, SoftBank said it will syndicate up to $10bn of the $40bn investment to co-investors, with its effective investment amount expected to reach $30bn.
OpenAI said in a blog post that it intends to use the funds to support ongoing AI research and infrastructure scaling efforts, with a focus on delivering increasingly advanced tools to the 500 million people who use ChatGPT weekly.
The funding will also help the company “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”, according to OpenAI.
In January 2025, OpenAI and SoftBank announced plans for a $500bn AI infrastructure project in the US, named Stargate.
The project was unveiled at the White House and involves an initial investment of $100bn, with plans to increase the investment to $500bn over the next four years.
According to OpenAI, the Stargate initiative aims to develop new AI infrastructure within the US, with the initial funding being deployed immediately.
SoftBank has invested $2.2bn in OpenAI through the SoftBank Vision Fund 2 since September 2024.
In alignment with this initiative, and to both further support OpenAI’s growth and capture the benefits of that growth in SoftBank’s NAV, SoftBank has decided to make follow-on investments in OpenAI, the Japanese multinational investment holding company said.
OpenAI introduced new image-generation features in March 2025 with the GPT-4o model, enhancing the system’s ability to create photorealistic visuals with improved precision.
