OpenAI raises new funding at a reported $300bn valuation

OpenAI confirmed a funding round of $40 billion, led by SoftBank Group with participation from Microsoft, Coatue, Altimeter and Thrive, at a $300 billion post-money valuation — reported by outlets including Bloomberg and PitchBook as the largest private technology fundraise on record. The valuation was nearly double the roughly $157 billion OpenAI had been valued at just five months earlier, in an October 2024 round.

The round’s structure attached a significant condition to most of the money: SoftBank was to provide an initial $10 billion by mid-April, with the remaining $30 billion contingent on OpenAI completing a conversion from its capped-profit structure to a conventional for-profit corporation by the end of 2025 — a restructuring OpenAI had been pursuing amid internal and external pressure, including objections from co-founder Elon Musk. OpenAI said roughly $18 billion of the raise was earmarked for its financial commitment to Stargate, the data-centre venture announced two months earlier with SoftBank and Oracle, and framed the capital broadly as funding for research, compute infrastructure and products serving what it said were 500 million weekly ChatGPT users.

The round underscored how far OpenAI’s capital needs had grown to match the scale of its compute ambitions, and how directly SoftBank — separately buying Ampere Computing and building Stargate the same year — had become intertwined with OpenAI’s infrastructure financing. The contingency on for-profit conversion also tied OpenAI’s largest fundraise yet to the outcome of its unresolved corporate-governance transition, a structural question the company would not fully settle for months.