An AI ‘gold rush.’ What to know about OpenAI’s record $40-billion funding round

San Francisco – Chatgpt Maker Openai announced this week that he had collected $ 40 billion while he rushes to dominate a competitive AI landscape against technology giants such as Google and its competitors, especially in the anthropogenic and Chinese depth of Deepsek.

The investment was the highest never lifted for a startup and Place Openai to an assessment of $ 300 billion, tied with the parent company of Tiktok bytedance and behind the valuation of $ 350 billion for Elon Musk SpaceX, according to the research company CB Insights.

“It is a gold rush with epic proportions of gold rushs before,” said Ben Bajarin, director general and principal analyst of the San José Creative Strategies consulting company. “They are not sitting on silver treasures like Amazon, Microsoft and Google. … They must collect these funds in order to compete with these three companies and that is what you see.”

Openai’s financing tour shows how ready to pay in a technology that has the potential to disrupt entertainment, health care, education and other important industries. The growing popularity of Chatgpt, published in 2022, triggered a race between technological companies that could change the functioning of people.

The capacity of chatbots fueled by AI to quickly generate text and images has aroused concerns among certain creations on the way in which AI models are formed and copyright holders are offset. But technological companies have also highlighted the potential advantages of AI such as the fight against diseases and climate change.

Here’s what you need to know:

How does the agreement work?

SoftBank said that he planned to finance up to $ 30 billion in the investment round of $ 40 billion and will not union $ 10 billion in other co-investors.

SoftBank has the possibility of reducing its investment amount to $ 20 billion if Openai does not change its commercial structure into a for -profit business by the end of this year, according to a person familiar with the question that was not authorized to comment.

Openai began as a non -profit organization in 2015 and then launched a for -profit subsidiary to supervise its commercial operations. The company explores the modification of the for -profit subsidiary in a public service company.

Elon Musk, who founded XAI, is opposed to the OpenAI restructuring plan because he thinks he is moving away from the founding principles of the company and misleads investors. Meta also raised concerns about the transition, telling California Atty. General Rob Bonta, in a letter last year, that he would have “seismic implications for Silicon Valley” because investors would have an incentive to launch organizations first as a non -profit organists and would benefit from tax franchise donations.

Why will OpenAi use money?

OPENAI said that funding will help the company based in San Francisco to carry out research on AI, to publish more powerful tools for the 500 million people who use Chatgpt each week and to develop its computer infrastructure such as data centers. People use Chatgpt to quickly generate text and images, search, think and perform other tasks.

“This investment helps us to push the border and make AI more useful in daily life,” said Sam Altman, Managing Director of Openai, in a press release.

Softbank, who directed the investment tour, said he supported Openai because the company is closest to the realization of what is known as the artificial general intelligence. OPENAI Described acted as “AI systems that are generally more intelligent than humans”, which allows people to get help for all tasks. Softbank also cited an effort called Stargate This was announced with President Trump in January to invest $ 500 billion in AI infrastructure over the next four years.

About 18 billion dollars in the investment round will go to Stargate, according to a person familiar with the question that refused to be appointed.

“Their support will help us to continue building AI systems that stimulate scientific discovery, allow personalized education, improve human creativity and open the way to AG which benefits all humanity”, ” OPENAI Said in a post announcing the financing tour.

Bajarin said Openai will have to extend its infrastructure to feed the use of its AI tools. After Openai released a new image generator in March that people were transformed into Ghibli-Studio style characters, the startup warned against delays because it treated a wave of traffic.

How will it affect the race to dominate AI?

Openai always faces a lot of competition from its competitors.

“No one knows who will be the Winner of the AI, and he is probably not a winner,” said Mike GUALTIERI, vice-president and principal analyst at Forrester, a research and advice company based in Massachusetts.

Rivals such as Google and Meta already bring together a mine of precious data on their users and have created applications used by billions of people, he said. Startups do not always end up winning the race against their most established competitors. Blackberry, for example, dominated the market with a device that has combined a phone with a physical keyboard – until Apple introduced its revolutionary iPhone with a touch screen.

Openai also faces competition from China, where startups such as In depth Affirm that they can compete with chatgpt at a much lower cost.

“In order to compete with Deepseek, you have to be better than Deepseek, and they need this kind of money to do exactly that,” said Gene Munster, Director Partner at Deepwater Asset Management, based in Minneapolis.

It is not clear if the bets of several billion dollars on the future of the AI ​​will be paid for investors, but the infrastructures such as data centers are always a precious active in companies.

AI companies could earn money from their models by concluding commercial partnerships and publishing applications for consumers and businesses. “You must make sure that certain data are unique, to have a certain value or they need applications,” said GUALTIERI.

Jeffrey Wlodarczak, principal and main analyst at the Pivotal Research Group, said that he would not exclude Chatgpt as a great competitor in AI race against technology giants.

“The big question is … to win, should you spend the most?” Wlodarczak said.