OpenAI Just Raised $110 Billion – And the Money Is Already Spoken For
The artificial intelligence arms race has a new financial benchmark. OpenAI closed a $110 billion private funding round on February 27, confirming what had been circulating in investment circles for weeks.
Key Takeaways
- OpenAI raised $110B at an $840B valuation – the largest private tech round ever.
- Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank led the deal, tied to massive cloud and chip commitments.
- AWS and Nvidia secured long-term compute dominance for OpenAI’s next-gen models.
- Microsoft remains a core partner with Azure API exclusivity and a 27% stake.
- Profitability is years away as OpenAI plans to burn over $200B building infrastructure.
The raise values the company at $730 billion before the new capital lands, and roughly $840 billion after — numbers that, until recently, were reserved for publicly traded tech titans.
Three Checks, One Direction
Three names wrote the checks. Amazon put in $50 billion, its largest single investment in another company to date. Nvidia added $30 billion. SoftBank came in for another $30 billion through Vision Fund 2, bringing its cumulative ownership in OpenAI to around 13%. On paper, it reads like a straightforward fundraise. The fine print tells a different story.
The Circular Money Machine
Nearly every dollar raised is contractually committed back to the investors who provided it. Amazon’s $50 billion comes alongside a $100 billion expansion of OpenAI’s existing AWS contract, spread over eight years. OpenAI has pledged 2 gigawatts of compute demand on Amazon’s proprietary Trainium chips and handed AWS the exclusive third-party distribution rights to OpenAI Frontier, a new platform for enterprise AI agent deployment.
Nvidia’s $30 billion investment similarly secures OpenAI’s position at the front of the hardware queue – 2 gigawatts of training capacity on the forthcoming Vera Rubin systems, plus 3 gigawatts of dedicated inference capacity.
The capital, in other words, is not sitting in a treasury. It is being recycled directly back into infrastructure, locking OpenAI into a web of dependencies with its own investors.
Where Microsoft Stands
Microsoft has watched this unfold with a public posture of calm. The company holds a 27% ownership stake — now estimated at around $200 billion — retains its exclusive IP license, and continues collecting a 20% share of OpenAI’s total revenue through 2032.
Azure remains the exclusive host for all stateless OpenAI APIs, meaning even traffic routed through Amazon Bedrock still runs on Microsoft’s cloud underneath. What Microsoft lost in the process is narrower but notable: Amazon, not Microsoft, owns the rights to distribute OpenAI Frontier to outside enterprises.
The Numbers Underneath the Headline
The business fundamentals behind all of this carry their own weight. OpenAI crossed 900 million weekly active users and surpassed $20 billion in annualized revenue last year. The company still does not expect to turn a profit before 2029 at the earliest and projects burning through more than $200 billion in capital between now and then.
A 2030 revenue target of $280 billion is built into internal models. An IPO — likely 2026 or 2027 — is expected to push the valuation past $1 trillion.
The Bigger Picture
The London research hub confirmed alongside this raise is almost a footnote. The real story is structural: OpenAI has become the center of gravity for the largest compute bets in the world, and the investors funding that position are the same ones profiting from it.
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Alex is an experienced financial journalist and cryptocurrency enthusiast. With over 8 years of experience covering the crypto, blockchain, and fintech industries, he is well-versed in the complex and ever-evolving world of digital assets. His insightful and thought-provoking articles provide readers with a clear picture of the latest developments and trends in the market. His approach allows him to break down complex ideas into accessible and in-depth content. Follow his publications to stay up to date with the most important trends and topics.
