Biggest private financing round in the tech industry: OpenAI receives 40 billion
The ChatGPT company is now worth a total of 300 billion US dollars. Of the tech companies not traded on the stock exchange, only SpaceX is larger.
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OpenAI has raised 40 billion US dollars in its latest financing round, more than any tech company ever before. OpenAI itself announced this and added that the company responsible for ChatGPT is now valued at a total of 300 billion US dollars. This means that only Elon Musk's US aerospace company SpaceX, which is not traded on the stock exchange, is worth more with a valuation of 350 billion US dollars, while the Chinese TikTok group ByteDance is worth the same amount. By far, the most money in the latest financing round came from the Japanese Softbank Group, which invested 30 billion US dollars. According to CNBC, the remaining 10 billion comes from Microsoft, among others.
OpenAI says it intends to use the fresh money to “continue pushing the boundaries of AI research”, scale its computing infrastructure and provide ever more powerful tools for all those people who use ChatGPT. That's 500 million per week, 25 percent more than in December. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman explained on the short message service X that the release of ChatGPT just over two years ago was the craziest viral moment he had ever seen. Back then, one million users were gained in five days. The last time so many were added in one hour.
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Citing an insider, CNBC also writes that OpenAI is to receive 10 billion US dollars immediately, with the rest of the sum to be paid at the end of the year. However, there is a significant restriction: Softbank announced on Monday that OpenAI will only receive the remaining 20 billion US dollars if the conversion into a for-profit company has been completed by the end of the year. Otherwise, the second tranche will be halved to 10 billion US dollars. This further increases the pressure on OpenAI to complete this process. Billionaire Elon Musk is trying to have the conversion prevented by the courts.
Farewell to the common good
Altman has been working for months to change OpenAI's corporate structure from the current non-profit model to that of a for-profit company. This should enable investors, who have already poured tens of billions into the AI company, to get money out of it in the long term. This is only possible to a limited extent with the current non-profit model. OpenAI is controlled by a non-profit organization. The rationale for this has always been that OpenAI's main goal is to develop artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity.
(mho)
