OpenAI Closes Record $122 Billion Round, Builds a New “Super-App”
On Tuesday, OpenAI announced the close of its latest funding round: $122 billion in committed capital at a post-money valuation of $852 billion. This makes it by far the largest private financing ever completed in the technology industry. The round was originally announced at $110 billion and was subsequently increased through additional institutional investors and, for the first time, retail investors.
Who invested
The round was led by three strategic partners: Amazon contributed the largest single amount, followed by SoftBank and NVIDIA. Microsoft, OpenAI’s core partner since 2019, also participated, though the exact sum was not disclosed.
Alongside SoftBank, the co-leads included Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), D. E. Shaw Ventures, Abu Dhabi fund MGX, TPG, and T. Rowe Price. A broad range of institutional investors also participated — from Sequoia Capital and Thrive Capital to BlackRock, Blackstone, and Fidelity, as well as Temasek and the investment office of the University of California.
Retail investors on board for the first time
Notably, OpenAI allowed retail investors access for the first time. Approximately $3 billion was raised from individual investors through the channels of three major banks. At the same time, the company announced that its shares will be included in several exchange-traded funds (ETFs) from ARK Invest — the investment firm of Cathie Wood, who had previously invested in OpenAI through her venture arm.
CFO Sarah Friar stated that the goal is not only to democratize access to the technology, but also access to the economic upside that AI creates. It is a clear signal toward broader ownership — and a strategic move ahead of a potential IPO.
IPO draws closer
The funding round comes at a time when OpenAI is actively preparing for a stock market listing. According to consistent media reports, the company is targeting an IPO in the fourth quarter of 2026. OpenAI has recently expanded its finance team — with a new Chief Accounting Officer and a new Head of Business Finance who will also be responsible for investor relations.
Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of Applications, recently stated at an all-hands meeting that the company wants to transform ChatGPT from a chatbot into a productivity tool and aggressively target enterprise applications. According to OpenAI, the enterprise segment already accounts for more than 40 percent of revenue and is expected to reach parity with the consumer business by year-end.
Competition is also a driver of the timing: Anthropic, Google’s AI investment and OpenAI’s strongest rival in the B2B market, is also expected to go public in 2026. Internally at OpenAI, there are concerns that an earlier Anthropic IPO could dampen demand for OpenAI shares.
How the money will be used
OpenAI is deploying the fresh capital on several fronts:
Infrastructure and compute: The company is massively expanding its computing capacity — no longer through a single cloud partner, but through a portfolio comprising Microsoft Azure, Oracle, AWS, CoreWeave, and Google Cloud. On the chip side, OpenAI is now relying not only on NVIDIA GPUs but also on AMD, AWS Trainium, Cerebras, and a proprietary chip developed in partnership with Broadcom. An agreement with NVIDIA was reached for three gigawatts of inference capacity and two gigawatts of training on the new Vera Rubin architecture.
Models and products: OpenAI recently introduced GPT-5.4 and expanded Codex into a fully-fledged coding agent. The APIs now process more than 15 billion tokens per minute. At the same time, the company has expanded into areas such as health, science, and commerce.
The super app strategy: Perhaps the most ambitious undertaking: OpenAI wants to build a unified AI super app. ChatGPT, Codex, browsing, and all agentic capabilities are to be brought together in a single interface. The underlying logic: the limiting factor is not the intelligence of the models, but usability. Rather than fragmented individual tools, a single system should understand intentions, execute actions, and operate across different applications and workflows. The consumer reach of more than 900 million weekly active users is intended to serve as an entry point for enterprise adoption.
The numbers at a glance
According to OpenAI, the company now generates $2 billion in revenue — per month. For the full year 2024, the figure was $13.1 billion; annualized, it now stands at $24 billion. ChatGPT has more than 900 million weekly active users and over 50 million paying subscribers. The search feature is seeing three times as much usage as a year ago, and an advertising pilot project reached more than $100 million in annualized revenue within six weeks.
Despite these figures, OpenAI remains unprofitable and continues to burn significant cash. The video platform Sora was also recently shut down again — the operating costs, estimated at over $5 billion annually, were apparently too high.
Assessment
The round is remarkable in several respects. It demonstrates that global capital providers are willing to commit historically unprecedented sums to a single AI company — despite a lack of profitability and an increasingly competitive market. Analysts at PitchBook ranked OpenAI as the weakest among the three major AI IPO candidates (alongside Anthropic and Databricks) in terms of fundamental business metrics — while simultaneously carrying the highest valuation.
Critics have also noted that some of the investments are not pure equity injections: Amazon’s participation is tied to an eight-year, $100 billion AWS usage contract, and NVIDIA’s contribution consists largely of computing capacity rather than cash. On Wall Street, voices are growing louder speaking of circular financing — companies investing in one another while simultaneously purchasing each other’s services.
For OpenAI, the fresh capital is nonetheless a decisive step on the path to an IPO. Whether the $852 billion valuation will hold up in the public market is set to become one of the most compelling questions in the entire technology sector in 2026.
