OpenAI raises $122B at an $852B valuation — a record round with Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank

OpenAI closed a funding round of $122 billion — one of the largest in venture capital history. The company is valued at $852 billion, making it the most expensive private startup on the planet. The investments were led by Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank, but the key detail of the round was something else: $3 billion was attracted from retail investors for the first time.

Until recently, participation in private deals of this scale was available only to large funds and institutional players. OpenAI changed the rules: the company opened the opportunity for a wide circle of ordinary investors to invest before the IPO. This became possible in part through specialized platforms that allow retail market participants to access pre-IPO shares of technology companies.

The amount of $122 billion is not the first mega-round in OpenAI's history. In late 2023, the company attracted $10 billion at a valuation of around $90 billion, and in early 2025 — $40 billion at a valuation of $340 billion. The valuation increase over two years was almost tenfold.

The main driver remains ChatGPT with an audience of over 500 million weekly users, as well as corporate products deployed in hundreds of large companies around the world. SoftBank continues its aggressive bet on the AI super-cycle. In early 2025, the Japanese investment company already announced the joint Stargate project worth $500 billion — the construction of data centers for AI needs in the US.

Participation in this round is a logical continuation of the same strategy. Amazon and Nvidia, for their part, are fixing strategic interest in the market leader: both are key suppliers of the infrastructure on which OpenAI's models run. Particular attention is drawn to the round structure.

A significant portion of the funds came not through traditional venture funds, but directly from retail participants. Analysts view this as preparation for an IPO: the company is conditioning a wide audience to the idea of owning shares before going public. The IPO itself, according to industry sources, could happen as early as 2026.

The $852 billion valuation puts OpenAI in the same league as the largest public technology companies. For comparison: a private AI startup today is valued roughly the same as Tesla — a company with a long history on the stock exchange. At the same time, OpenAI remains unprofitable: operating losses in 2024, according to press reports, exceeded $5 billion with revenue of about $3.

7 billion. Investors are betting not on current profit, but on long-term dominance in AI infrastructure. OpenAI's record round is a symptom of a broader phenomenon.

AI companies today attract capital by logic reminiscent of an arms race: Amazon invested billions in Anthropic, Microsoft — in OpenAI earlier, Google develops Gemini, Meta opens Llama. The stakes in this game — control over the AI layer on which the next generation of applications and businesses will run. OpenAI is currently leading, but the scale of resources being attracted suggests that the competition is far from over.