Sam Altman beat Elon Musk once again as retail investors just entered OpenAI’s latest funding round and helped propel it to a massive $852 billion valuation after the company secured $122 billion in committed capital on Tuesday.
In a press release, OpenAI confirmed that the round closed with strong support from key partners, with Amazon, NVIDIA and SoftBank anchoring the deal, while Microsoft remains involved as a long-term partner.
SoftBank worked alongside a16z, DE Shaw Ventures, MGX, TPG and funds advised by T. Rowe Price. A long list of companies have joined, including BlackRock, Blackstone, Sequoia, Temasek, Fidelity, Coatue, Dragoneer and ARK Invest.
For the first time, OpenAI allowed access through banking channels and raised more than $3 billion directly from individual investors.
OpenAI is bringing in global capital and driving revenue growth at record speed
Meanwhile, OpenAI’s ChatGPT platform is claimed to have over 900 million weekly users and over 50 million paid subscribers.
The company said it generated $1 billion in revenue within one year of launching ChatGPT. By the end of 2024, this number has reached $1 billion per quarter. It now has revenues of $2 billion a month. Growth is four times faster than the early growth seen by Alphabet and Meta.
ChatGPT leads consumer AI by a wide margin. It records web visits and mobile sessions six times more than the second largest AI application. Total time spent on the platform is four times higher than any competitor, and four times higher than all other AI applications combined.
Search usage has nearly tripled over the past year. The company’s ad pilot program generated more than $100 million in annual revenue in less than six weeks.
Enterprise use is also on the rise. Business customers now account for more than 40 percent of total revenue. OpenAI It expects enterprise revenues to match consumer revenues by 2026. APIs process more than 15 billion tokens every minute.
Codex has more than 2 million weekly users having grown five-fold in three months, with usage increasing by more than 70 percent month-on-month.
OpenAI also expanded its revolving credit facility to approximately $4.7 billion. This facility is supported by JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, UBS, HSBC, Santander, and other banks. The company did not derive from it.
OpenAI says it continues to rely heavily on it Nvidia For training and inference, while also working across Microsoft, Oracle, AWS, CoreWeave, and Google Cloud for broader deployment.
The company also uses multiple chipset systems including NVIDIA, AMD, AWS Trainium, Cerebras, and custom silicon developed with Broadcom.
Sam He said OpenAI computing powers every layer of its system, including research, models, products, and revenue generation, while also claiming that improvements in hardware and algorithms reduce the cost of delivering information while increasing model capability.
The company is now working on a unified AI system that combines ChatGPT, Codex, browsing, and proxy tools into one platform. This approach connects consumer usage to enterprise adoption and allows for faster product updates across the system, OpenAI said.
