Some funding rounds whisper. This one hums like a power plant warming up. OpenAI is reportedly nearing a funding package north of $100B, with total capital in this latest raise potentially pushing past $126B. Pre money valuation around $730B. Post money flirting with $850B. Numbers so large they stop sounding like money and start sounding like GDP. Bloomberg says the first phase centers on strategic heavyweights. Amazon up to $50B. SoftBank as much as $30B. NVIDIA around $20B. Microsoft back in the mix as both partner and participant. Not a cap table. A Mount Rushmore of compute.
Respect where it is due. Congratulations to Sam Altman, CEO and co-founder, and Greg Brockman, President and co-founder. Salute to Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Wojciech Zaremba, and Elon Musk for being in the original room when this was an idea and not an inevitability. Credit to Sarah Friar, CFO, and Kevin Weil, CPO, for helping translate ambition into operating discipline. And to Bret Taylor, Adam D’Angelo, Lawrence Summers, Sue Desmond Hellmann, Nicole Seligman, and Fidji Simo on the board, guiding governance while the rocket keeps accelerating.
OpenAI began in December 2015 as a nonprofit research bet on artificial general intelligence. Idealism with code. Then reality walked in wearing a data center badge. Training frontier models is not cheap. It is capital intensive, infrastructure hungry, and power grid aware. Microsoft’s early $1B in 2019 and multiyear commitments since then built the Azure backbone. NVIDIA’s silicon turned theory into tokens. Now Amazon and SoftBank are circling with checkbooks that read like balance sheets.
The business model has muscle. ChatGPT subscriptions. Enterprise deployments. API usage across developers and global companies. Even testing advertising on the free tier while inching toward profitability and still burning cash like a research lab chasing the horizon. OpenAI is not just building models. It is building markets.
There is a lesson in this scale. Capital follows conviction, but it also follows traction. 100M+ users. Deep enterprise integration. Strategic partners who need the models as much as the models need the machines. When your product becomes infrastructure, the funding round becomes infrastructure too.
OpenAI does not just open AI. It opens balance sheets, boardrooms, and data centers. It turns tokens into leverage and leverage into latitude. The real question is not whether this round closes. It is what 100B+ in fresh oxygen does to a company already breathing at the edge of what is computationally possible, and who is ready for the draft that follows.
