By Yu Yang and Meng Yao
Just now, OpenAI completed a record-breaking financing round:
Financing amount: $122 billion (approximately 841.154 billion RMB), with a post-money valuation of $852 billion (approximately 5.9 trillion RMB).
For this round, OpenAI opened participation opportunities to investors through banking channels for the first time, raising over $3 billion from individual investors.
Following this financing round, market expectations for an OpenAI IPO have grown increasingly high.
OpenAI Sets Its Largest Financing Record in History
This financing was jointly led by institutional investors including Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank.
Nvidia and SoftBank each invested $30 billion, while Amazon contributed $50 billion.
Meanwhile, Microsoft, a long-term partner of OpenAI, also appeared on the list of investors.
Although the official press release did not disclose the specific amount invested this time, Microsoft had cumulatively invested over $13 billion in OpenAI by the end of last year, underscoring the depth of their relationship.
In addition to previous rounds, there was a slight but notable change: for the first time, OpenAI opened its window to individual investors, absorbing an additional $3 billion in funds.
This reflects a shift in OpenAI’s capital structure from being dominated by a few tech giants toward a broader, more diversified financing model with dispersed sources of capital.
Under this staggering valuation, many netizens commented that “this is a huge gamble on the fact that Scaling Laws have no upper limit.”
Sam Altman now faces greater pressure to justify this massive valuation. Recently, OpenAI has cut several features and products, including Sora, to consolidate computing power and control costs.
According to OpenAI’s official announcement, their confidence stems from the following:
OpenAI is the fastest technology platform to reach 10 million users and the fastest to reach 100 million users, and it will soon become the fastest to reach 1 billion weekly active users.
The company stated that within one year of launching ChatGPT, OpenAI’s revenue reached $1 billion. By the end of 2024, its quarterly revenue hit $1 billion.
Currently, OpenAI’s monthly revenue has reached $2 billion.
Our revenue growth rate is four times that of companies like Alphabet (Google’s parent company) and Meta, which defined the internet and mobile internet eras.
OpenAI’s revenue last year was $13.1 billion. However, it has not yet achieved profitability.
Additionally, in its announcement, OpenAI revealed that its advertising pilot project exceeded an annualized run rate (ARR) of $100 million within six weeks.
Currently, ToB (business-to-business) revenue accounts for over 40% of OpenAI’s total income and is expected to equal ToC (consumer-facing) revenue by 2026.
Looking ahead, OpenAI will focus on building “AI Super Apps”—single systems capable of understanding intent, executing actions, and operating across applications, data, and workflows.