OpenAI pulls in billions from retail investors, outpaces Musk

Sam Altman just outdid Elon Musk yet again as retail investors just stepped into OpenAI’s latest funding round and helped push it to a massive $852 billion valuation after the company secured $122 billion in committed capital on Tuesday.

In a press release, OpenAI confirmed the round closed with strong backing from major partners, as Amazon, NVIDIA, and SoftBank anchored the deal, while Microsoft stayed involved as a long-term partner.

SoftBank worked alongside a16z, D. E. Shaw Ventures, MGX, TPG, and funds advised by T. Rowe Price. A long list of firms joined, including BlackRock, Blackstone, Sequoia, Temasek, Fidelity, Coatue, Dragoneer, and ARK Invest.

For the first time, OpenAI allowed access through bank channels and raised more than $3 billion directly from individual investors.

OpenAI is bringing in global capital and pushing revenue growth at record speed

Meanwhile, OpenAI’s ChatGPT platform allegedly has more than 900 million weekly users and over 50 million paying subscribers.

The company said it generated $1 billion in revenue within one year of launching ChatGPT. By the end of 2024, that number reached $1 billion per quarter. It now reports $2 billion in revenue every month. Growth is running at a rate four times faster than early growth seen at Alphabet and Meta.

ChatGPT leads consumer AI by a wide margin. It records six times more web visits and mobile sessions than the next largest AI app. Total time spent on the platform is four times higher than any competitor and also four times higher than all other AI apps combined.

Search usage has nearly tripled over the past year. The company’s ads pilot reached more than $100 million in annual revenue in less than six weeks.

Enterprise usage is also rising. Business customers now account for more than 40 percent of total revenue. OpenAI expects enterprise revenue to match consumer revenue by 2026. APIs process more than 15 billion tokens every minute.

Codex has over 2 million weekly users after growing five times in three months, with usage increasing more than 70 percent month over month.

OpenAI also expanded its revolving credit facility to about $4.7 billion. The facility is backed by JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, UBS, HSBC, Santander, and other banks. The company has not drawn from it.

OpenAI says it continues to rely heavily on NVIDIA for training and inference, while also working across Microsoft, Oracle, AWS, CoreWeave, and Google Cloud for broader deployment.

The company is also using multiple chip systems including NVIDIA, AMD, AWS Trainium, Cerebras, and custom silicon developed with Broadcom.

Sam said OpenAI’s compute supports every layer of its system, including research, models, products, and revenue generation, while also claiming that improvements in hardware and algorithms are reducing the cost of delivering intelligence while increasing model capability.

The company is now working on a unified AI system that combines ChatGPT, Codex, browsing, and agent tools into one platform. OpenAI said this approach connects consumer usage with enterprise adoption and allows faster product updates across the system.

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