OpenAI raises up to US 40bn in deal with SoftBank

OpenAI said it had raised US 40bn in a funding round that valued the ChatGPT maker at 300bn – the biggest capital-raising session ever for a startup. It comes in a partnership with the Japanese investment group SoftBank and "enables us to push the frontiers of AI research even further," OpenAI announced, adding it would "pave the way toward AGI (artificial general intelligence)" for which "massive computing power is essential". SoftBank said it wanted to realise "artificial super intelligence" (ASI) surpassing human intelligence and OpenAI was the partner closest to achieving that goal. SoftBank is to put 10bn at first into OpenAI and 30bn more by the end of 2025 if certain conditions are met. Also on Monday, OpenAI announced it was building a more open generative AI model as it faces growing competition in the open-source space from DeepSeek and Meta.