OpenAI secures $110B in new funding; Amazon to invest $50B

OpenAI has announced a sweeping new investment of $110 billion, valuing the artificial intelligence company at $730 billion before the financing and marking one of the largest capital raises in corporate history.

The funding includes commitments of $50 billion from Amazon, $30 billion from SoftBank and $30 billion from NVIDIA, OpenAI said on Friday.

The investment significantly strengthens OpenAI’s balance sheet as it scales infrastructure to meet surging global demand for generative AI tools.

“These partnerships expand our global reach, deepen our infrastructure, and strengthen our balance sheet so we can bring frontier AI to more people, more businesses, and more communities worldwide,” OpenAI said in a statement.

Amazon would invest $50 billion in OpenAI as part of a multi-year strategic partnership aimed at accelerating AI innovation for enterprises, startups and consumers.

The investment will begin with an initial $15 billion injection, followed by an additional $35 billion once certain conditions are met.

New stateful AI tools on AWS

As part of the expanded partnership, OpenAI and Amazon said they are jointly developing a Stateful Runtime Environment powered by OpenAI’s models.

The new capability will be available through Amazon Bedrock, allowing developers to build AI applications that retain context, memory and access to compute across extended workflows.

The companies described stateful developer environments as the next phase of frontier AI usage, enabling models to remember prior work, interact across software tools and data sources, and support ongoing projects rather than isolated prompts.

The environment is expected to launch within the next few months.

These tools will be trained to run optimally on AWS infrastructure and integrated with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and other cloud services so customers’ AI applications operate cohesively with existing workloads hosted on AWS.

Expanded cloud agreement with AWS

The partnership also significantly expands OpenAI’s existing commercial relationship with Amazon Web Services.

The companies said they are extending their current $38 billion multi-year agreement by an additional $100 billion over eight years.

Under the expanded deal, OpenAI has committed to consuming roughly two gigawatts of Amazon’s Trainium AI chip capacity.

The companies said this would help lower costs and improve efficiency in producing AI systems at scale, supporting demand for OpenAI Frontier, the Stateful Runtime Environment and other advanced workloads.

AWS will also become the exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider for OpenAI Frontier, the company’s most advanced enterprise AI platform, as corporate demand for large-scale AI deployment accelerates.

Custom models and enterprise focus

Beyond infrastructure, OpenAI and Amazon will collaborate to develop customised AI models for Amazon developers, including teams building customer-facing applications.

Amazon said its internal teams will be able to tailor OpenAI models for use across products and AI agents that interact directly with users.

These customised offerings will complement Amazon’s existing Nova family of models, giving developers additional tools to build and deploy AI services at scale.

“OpenAI and Amazon share a belief that AI should show up in ways that are practical and genuinely useful for people,” said Sam Altman.

“Combining OpenAI’s models with Amazon’s infrastructure and global reach helps us put powerful AI into the hands of businesses and users at real scale.”

Andy Jassy said the collaboration would expand what developers can build on AWS, adding that Amazon was encouraged by OpenAI’s decision to rely heavily on its custom AI silicon.

OpenAI reports rapid user growth of ChatGPT, Codex

The funding comes as OpenAI reports rapid growth across its consumer and developer products.

ChatGPT now has more than 900 million weekly active users, while weekly users of Codex, its AI coding tool, have more than tripled since the start of the year to 1.6 million.

The company also said it has more than 50 million consumer subscribers, with subscriber momentum accelerating at the start of the year.

January and February are on track to be the strongest months for new subscriptions in OpenAI’s history.