SoftBank in Talks to Invest Up to $25 Billion in OpenAI
A new investment from the Japanese conglomerate would be separate from the $100 billion tied to a project announced at the White House last week.
A new investment from the Japanese conglomerate would be separate from the $100 billion tied to a project announced at the White House last week.
OpenAI, the San Francisco artificial intelligence company that has been on a yearslong money-raising frenzy, is in talks with the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank for an investment up to $25 billion, according to three people familiar with the negotiations.
Some of that money could be used to cover OpenAI’s commitment to Stargate, the $100 billion data center project announced at the White House last week, the people said. But the money would be separate from the investment SoftBank is already putting into that project.
The sources, who requested anonymity because the talks were confidential, stressed that discussion around the terms of the investment are still ongoing. One person familiar with the negotiations said the deal could value OpenAI in the vicinity of $250 billion, while another put the valuation closer to $340 billion. The larger figure would make OpenAI the second most valuable private company in the world, just behind Elon Musk’s SpaceX, according to CB Insights, which tracks start-ups.
Stargate, a joint venture of SoftBank, OpenAI and the software company Oracle, could result in $500 billion of investment in computing infrastructure, the companies have said.
The negotiations were reported earlier by the Financial Times.
OpenAI started the A.I. boom in late 2022 with the release of its online chatbot, ChatGPT. But the company has had an unusually tumultuous few years since then.
Executives are still trying to repair OpenAI’s reputation after its board of directors unexpectedly fired its chief executive, Sam Altman, about a year after ChatGPT was released. He was reinstated five days later, but OpenAI has lost several prominent employees since then, including Ilya Sutskever, its chief scientist and a co-founder.
