OpenAI closes record $122 billion funding round at $852 billion valuation

OpenAI closed a $122 billion funding round at an $852 billion valuation, superseding the $110 billion round at a $730 billion pre-money valuation it had announced barely five weeks earlier, and reported as the largest private funding round in history. SoftBank and Andreessen Horowitz co-led the round, with D.E. Shaw Ventures, MGX, TPG and T. Rowe Price Associates also participating alongside continuing investors Amazon, Nvidia and Microsoft.

The round included a roughly $3 billion tranche from individual investors, arranged through bank channels rather than through OpenAI’s own platform, with ARK Invest separately saying it would add OpenAI shares to several of its exchange-traded funds to broaden the company’s shareholder base — an unusual route for retail money into a company that had not yet gone public. OpenAI also said it had expanded its revolving credit facility to $4.7 billion, which remained undrawn, giving it additional financial headroom beyond the equity raised.

The rapid escalation from one record round to a larger one within five weeks illustrated how quickly capital was flowing into frontier AI labs’ infrastructure build-outs, and how routine “largest ever” private funding claims had become by this point in the buildout. The round also positioned OpenAI more explicitly for a future public listing: the retail and ETF participation gave a wider base of investors indirect exposure to the company ahead of a confidential S-1 filing with the SEC that followed roughly ten weeks later.