Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank back OpenAI in one of the largest private raises ever

OpenAI has closed a $110 billion funding round backed by Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank Group, marking one of the largest private capital raises on record.

The financing assigns OpenAI a $730 billion pre-money valuation. Amazon is contributing $50 billion, while Nvidia and SoftBank are each investing $30 billion. According to the companies, additional financial investors may join the round at a later stage.

Amazon’s $50 billion commitment includes an initial $15 billion, with the remaining $35 billion contingent on performance milestones. Alongside the investment, the companies announced a multi-year strategic partnership that will expand OpenAI’s use of Amazon Web Services infrastructure.

Under the agreement, AWS will become the exclusive third-party cloud provider for OpenAI’s enterprise platform, Frontier. OpenAI also plans to expand its existing cloud commitments with AWS significantly over the coming years, adding large-scale compute capacity powered in part by Amazon’s in-house AI chips.

The announcement does not alter OpenAI’s longstanding partnership with Microsoft, which both companies said remains in place under existing terms.

As part of the broader financing, OpenAI is deepening its collaboration with Nvidia, securing access to dedicated inference and training capacity on next-generation systems. The company said it plans to deploy multiple gigawatts of compute for both model training and inference workloads, reinforcing its push to scale infrastructure amid rising demand for generative AI services.

The capital injection comes as OpenAI faces increasing competition from rivals including Google’s Gemini and Anthropic, particularly in enterprise AI services.

OpenAI has indicated that infrastructure investment remains central to its long-term strategy. The company is targeting hundreds of billions of dollars in cumulative compute spending by the end of the decade, reflecting the cost of data centers, GPUs and power requirements needed to train and deploy advanced models.

Since launching ChatGPT more than three years ago, OpenAI has expanded across consumer and enterprise markets. The company reports hundreds of millions of weekly active users and millions of paying business customers, while positioning its Frontier platform as a tool for building and managing AI-driven workflows.

Although the transaction is structured as a funding round rather than a merger, the scale of the investment and the strategic cloud alignment could draw attention from U.S. regulators. The Federal Trade Commission has previously examined relationships between major AI developers and large technology companies.

With this latest raise, OpenAI sets a new benchmark for late-stage private valuations in the technology sector. The funding underscores the capital intensity of advanced AI development, where access to compute, cloud distribution and long-term financing increasingly shapes competitive positioning.