OpenAI has secured a significant tranche of funding from a Japanese group that has further increased the market value of the AI pioneer.
OpenAI announced that it has secured a $40 billion (£30.8 billion) funding deal with the Japanese group SoftBank – a deal that values the ChatGPT developer at $300 billion (£231 billion).
It comes after OpenAI raised billions of dollars in 2024. Last October for example OpenAI raised $6.6 billion (£5.09 billion) from new investor Nvidia, as well as returning investors Microsoft and venture capital firms Thrive Capital and Khosla Ventures.
Funding deal
That previous funding round valued OpenAI at $157 billion, which had made OpenAI one of the most valuable private companies in the world.
It came as the AI startup is restructuring itself into “for-profit benefit corporation” – a significant move away from its “non-profit” roots.
Now OpenAI has announced a new tranche of funding, which will see up to $30 billion from SoftBank, and $10 billion from a syndicate of investors including Microsoft – a key backer of OpenAI – as well as Coatue Management, Altimeter Capital and Thrive Capital.
“Today we’re announcing new funding – $40 billion at a $300 billion post-money valuation, which enables us to push the frontiers of AI research even further, scale our compute infrastructure, and deliver increasingly powerful tools for the 500 million people who use ChatGPT every week,” stated the AI startup.
“We’re excited to be working in partnership with SoftBank Group – few companies understand how to scale transformative technology like they do,” it added. “Their support will help us continue building AI systems that drive scientific discovery, enable personalised education, enhance human creativity, and pave the way toward AGI that benefits all of humanity.”
User surge
The fundraising came as CEO Sam Altman tweeted on X (formerly Twitter) that OpenAI has witnessed a surge of users.
the chatgpt launch 26 months ago was one of the craziest viral moments i’d ever seen, and we added one million users in five days.
we added one million users in the last hour.
— Sam Altman (@sama) March 31, 2025
Altman tweeted that ChatGPT had added a million users in just one hour as its new image generation feature takes off with consumers – accompanied by a viral obsession with recreating Studio Ghibli-style art.
Stargate Program
OpenAI and SoftBank are no strangers to each other, as both were part of the initial group in January that announced the ‘Stargate Project’ – a joint venture that will drive $500 billion AI infrastructure in the United States,
OpenAI has already begun considering proposals from 16 US states for possible locations for massive AI data centres under the Stargate plan.
In February SoftBank also announced it would to create a joint-venture with OpenAI to market AI services to Japanese corporate customers, as the investment firm broadens its exposure to the AI sector.