OpenAI hauls in $110B in third round of funding
Feb. 27 (UPI) — Amazon, Nvidia and Softbank collectively invested $100 billion dollars in OpenAI, which is double the amount of money the company raised in a 2025 funding round and pushes it to a $730 billion pre-money valuation.
The funding round is one of the largest private funding rounds in history — $50 billion from Amazon, $30 billion from Nvidia and $30 billion from Softbank — and OpenAI said the fundraising round has not closed, with more investors expected, CNBC and TechCrunch reported.
The new investment from Amazon builds on the existing $38 billion multi-year agreement the two companies already have, which OpenAI said in a press release is planned to expand by $100 billion over the next 8 years.
“We’re super excited about this deal,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in an interview with CNBC. “AI is going to happen everywhere. It’s transforming the whole economy, and the world needs a lot of collective computing power to meet the demand.”
At the core of the broadening collaboration between Amazon and OpenAI is the development of a Stateful Runtime Environment that runs on Amazon Web Services.
AWS also will be the exclusive third-party vendor for OpenAI Frontier, an enterprise platform for AI agent deployment.
The power required to run AI systems continues to grow exponentially, and the Amazon deal also will allow OpenAI to start building custom AI applications — most notably, one for Amazon’s customer-facing applications.
In a joint statement with Microsoft, which OpenAI has been working with since 2019, the two companies said that the new investment deals will not affect their relationship and that the partnership “remains strong and central.”
Microsoft Azure remains the exclusive cloud provider of stateless OpenAI APIs and OpenAI Frontier will continue to be hosted on Azure, the companies said.
