OpenAI Secures $110B From Amazon, Nvidia, SoftBank; Valuation Soars to $730B

The ChatGPT maker has closed one of the largest private funding rounds in history, with Amazon leading at $50 billion and significant infrastructure partnerships attached to each investment. The round remains open.

OpenAI announced on Friday that it has raised $110 billion in a new funding round, one of the largest private capital raises in history. The round values the company at $730 billion on a pre-money basis and was led by Amazon with a $50 billion commitment, joined by Nvidia and SoftBank at $30 billion each. OpenAI said the round remains open and expects additional investors to participate as it proceeds.

The raise follows OpenAI’s previous round, which closed in March 2025 at $40 billion against a $300 billion valuation, itself the largest private funding round on record at the time. In under a year, the company’s pre-money valuation has grown by $430 billion, placing it among the most valuable private companies in history.

OpenAI framed the raise as a response to accelerating demand across its products. ChatGPT now has more than 900 million weekly active users and over 50 million consumer subscribers. January and February 2026 are on track to be the largest months for new subscribers in the company’s history. More than 9 million paying business users rely on ChatGPT for work, and usage of Codex, OpenAI’s AI-powered software development tool, has more than tripled since the start of the year to 1.6 million weekly users.

Each of the three lead investors carries an infrastructure partnership alongside its capital commitment. As part of Amazon’s $50 billion investment, AWS will serve as the exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider for OpenAI Frontier, the company’s enterprise platform for building and managing AI agents. OpenAI and Amazon are jointly developing a Stateful Runtime Environment, powered by OpenAI models, that will be available through Amazon Bedrock. OpenAI will also build custom models to support Amazon’s consumer-facing products, complementing Amazon’s existing Nova model family. Andy Jassy, President and CEO of Amazon, said the collaboration on stateful runtime environments will change what is possible for customers building AI applications and agents.

“SoftBank, Nvidia, and Amazon are long-term partners who share our ambition to turn real scientific progress into systems that deliver meaningful benefits for people at global scale.”
Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI · February 27, 2026

Nvidia, SoftBank, and the Microsoft Position

Nvidia’s $30 billion participation ends months of speculation about the scale of its commitment. Reports of a $100 billion Nvidia investment circulated in September 2025 before subsequent reporting suggested the figure had been reduced. In January, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang pushed back against those reports. The partnership announced Friday commits OpenAI to 3 gigawatts of dedicated inference capacity and 2 gigawatts of training on Nvidia’s Vera Rubin systems, adding to existing deployments on Hopper and Blackwell hardware. Huang said in a statement that Nvidia has been privileged to partner with OpenAI since its earliest days and that together they will continue building infrastructure for the age of AI.

SoftBank’s $30 billion contribution continues a relationship that has deepened consistently over the past year. The Japanese conglomerate also led OpenAI’s March 2025 round and remains one of the company’s most consistent large-scale backers. Microsoft, whose existing relationship with OpenAI predates and underpins much of the company’s commercial infrastructure, issued a joint statement with OpenAI on Friday clarifying that the new investors do not change their arrangement. Microsoft said it maintains its exclusive licence and access to intellectual property across OpenAI models and products, and that the Amazon partnership was always contemplated under their existing agreements.

What the Capital is for?

The new valuation has a direct consequence for the OpenAI Foundation, the nonprofit that sits at the top of OpenAI’s corporate structure. The $730 billion pre-money valuation increases the Foundation’s stake in OpenAI Group to over $180 billion, making it one of the most financially resourced nonprofits in history. OpenAI said this expands the Foundation’s capacity to fund philanthropy in areas including health and AI resilience.

OpenAI said the raise is directed at three things: compute capacity, distribution reach, and capital to meet accelerating demand. “AI demand is surging across consumers, developers, and businesses,” the company said. “Meeting that demand and providing everyone access to our products requires compute, distribution, and capital.” The round is structured to allow additional investors to join, meaning the final figure could exceed $110 billion.

The company also announced an expansion of its London research hub, set to become its largest centre outside the United States, focused on safety evaluation and model performance. The move signals a broader push to build global R&D presence as competition for AI researchers intensifies.

The raise does not resolve the structural questions around OpenAI’s corporate form. The company completed a recapitalization in October 2025, converting its for-profit arm into OpenAI Group PBC while keeping the OpenAI Foundation as the controlling nonprofit. That restructuring has been legally challenged by Elon Musk, a co-founder, and requires sign-off from the California Attorney General. Microsoft’s stake has been aligned to the new structure under a restructured commercial agreement.

The competitive backdrop has also shifted. Google’s Gemini 3.1 models, announced this week, have moved significantly closer to frontier performance. Anthropic’s Claude holds a strong position in the enterprise market. Meta’s open-source Llama models continue to attract developers who want capable AI without licensing costs. Chinese competitors including DeepSeek have shown that frontier-level model performance can be reached at substantially lower training cost. At $730 billion, OpenAI is betting that infrastructure scale, product ubiquity, and distribution depth, not model capability alone, will determine who leads the next phase of AI.

Disclaimer: This article is based on OpenAI’s official press release dated February 27, 2026. All user figures, valuation numbers, and partnership details are sourced directly from OpenAI’s announcement. NervNow has not independently verified financial projections cited from third-party analyses.

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