SAN FRANCISCO — OpenAI said Friday it has secured $110 billion in new funding led by Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank, valuing the ChatGPT maker at about $840 billion. The OpenAI $110 billion funding round will finance a sweeping expansion of chips, data centers and cloud distribution as OpenAI races to meet demand for its models, Feb. 27, 2026.
In its announcement, OpenAI said the raise values the company at $730 billion pre-money and that additional investors are expected to join as the round progresses.
OpenAI $110 billion funding round: who wrote the checks
OpenAI said Amazon is investing $50 billion, while Nvidia and SoftBank each committed $30 billion. A Reuters report said Amazon’s commitment starts with $15 billion and includes another $35 billion tied to conditions disclosed by the companies.
SoftBank said its $30 billion participation will be made through SoftBank Vision Fund 2 in tranches across 2026. In a SoftBank press release, the company said its cumulative investment in OpenAI is expected to total $64.6 billion, translating to about a 13% ownership stake once its follow-on investment closes.
Key terms from the OpenAI $110 billion funding round
- Round size: $110 billion
- Valuation: $730 billion pre-money; about $840 billion post-money
- Lead investors: Amazon ($50B), Nvidia ($30B), SoftBank ($30B)
- Compute commitments: About 2 gigawatts of Trainium capacity on AWS; 3 gigawatts of dedicated inference plus 2 gigawatts of training on Nvidia Vera Rubin systems (OpenAI)
Where the money goes: compute, chips and OpenAI Frontier
The checks come with infrastructure strings. Under a multi-year strategic partnership, AWS will become the exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider for OpenAI Frontier, OpenAI’s enterprise agent platform, and OpenAI will commit to consuming about 2 gigawatts of Amazon Trainium capacity. Amazon said the partnership also includes a “stateful” runtime environment for building agents at production scale.
OpenAI said it is expanding its chip partnership with Nvidia, including commitments for 3 gigawatts of dedicated inference capacity and 2 gigawatts of training on Vera Rubin systems, alongside existing Hopper and Blackwell deployments.
Despite the Amazon tie-up, OpenAI said Microsoft Azure remains its exclusive cloud provider for the APIs that give developers access to OpenAI models, preserving a relationship that has underpinned OpenAI’s commercial scale.
Why Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank are lining up
For Amazon, the deal converts OpenAI demand into long-term AWS consumption — and a marquee customer for Trainium as it tries to broaden the chip stack beyond Nvidia GPUs. For Nvidia, the investment tightens an already symbiotic relationship: OpenAI gets capacity and roadmap access, while Nvidia locks in one of the world’s biggest buyers of AI hardware.
SoftBank framed its follow-on investment as a bet on OpenAI’s user base and technical lead. Masayoshi Son, SoftBank’s chairman and CEO, said “AI is transforming the world at an unprecedented pace,” in the company’s Feb. 27 disclosure.
How OpenAI’s valuation trajectory got here
The $840 billion price tag is a steep escalation from OpenAI’s earlier fundraising milestones. In October 2023, Reuters reported OpenAI was in talks for a secondary share sale that valued it at about $86 billion, after a separate $300 million share sale earlier that year valued the company around $30 billion.
By September 2024, Reuters reported OpenAI was pursuing a roughly $150 billion valuation and weighing structural changes designed to make mega-financings easier — a governance debate that foreshadowed today’s infrastructure-heavy economics.
OpenAI’s current cloud posture also traces back to Microsoft’s January 2023 announcement of a new phase in the companies’ partnership, covering supercomputing and product commercialization. Microsoft said the investment would extend prior rounds in 2019 and 2021, cementing Azure as the backbone for OpenAI’s model services.
What to watch next
OpenAI said the round remains open, suggesting more strategic and financial backers could join. Investors will be watching whether the compute-heavy roadmap translates into durable revenue — and how quickly OpenAI can turn its stated scale (900 million weekly active ChatGPT users and more than 50 million consumer subscribers) into margins that can support a potential initial public offering.
In the near term, the OpenAI $110 billion funding round shifts the AI arms race further toward infrastructure: power contracts, silicon supply and cloud distribution are becoming as decisive as model quality. For customers, it could mean faster access to larger models — but also a tighter web of dependencies between the biggest AI lab and the biggest cloud and chip players.
