OpenAi CEO Sam Altman speaks alongside Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son after the US President Donald Trump comments on AI infrastructure in the Roosevelt Room in the White House in Washington on January 21, 2025.
Carlos Barria | Reuters
OpenAi is in conversation to raise up to $ 40 billion in a financing round that would increase the valuation of the artificial intelligence company to $ 340 billion, CNBC has confirmed.
The Masayoshi Son Softbank would lead and contribute between $ 15 billion and 25 billion, according to two people who are familiar with the negotiations that asked not to be mentioned because the conversations are underway. Softbank would surpass Microsoft As the best backai backai.
The Wall Street Journal First reported about the conversations.
Part of the financing can be used for the dedication of OpenAI to Stargate, a joint venture between Softbank, OpenAi and Oracle that was introduced last week by President Donald Trump, according to the sources. The plan requires billions of dollars to invest in the American AI infrastructure.
OpenAi was last appreciated at $ 157 billion by private investors. At the end of 2022, the company launched its chatgpt -chatbot and started the boom in generative AI. OpenAi closed its latest round of $ 6.6 billion in October and made up to aggressively compete with the Xai of Elon Musk, as well as Microsoft, Google” Amazon And anthropic.
In the meantime, the Chinese startup Lab Deepseek blows up in the US and presents new competition to OpenAi. Deepseek saw his app to the top of Apple’s App Store ranking this week and rowed the American markets on reports that his powerful model was trained for a fraction of the costs of American competitors.
During an event in Washington, DC, organized on Thursday by OpenAi, CEO Sam Altman said that Deepseek is “clearly a great model”.
“This is a memory of the level of competition and the need for democratic already to win,” he said. He said it also points to the “level of interest in reasoning, the level of interest in open source.”
