Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank invested 110 billion in OpenAI. What are the benefits?
On February 27, OpenAI announced the closing of a new funding round of approximately $110 billion, with a pre-investment valuation of $730 billion.
This is another record-setting fundraising for OpenAI following last year's $41 billion round, and is the largest private tech company financing to date.
This round is led by strategic investors, among which Amazon is investing $50 billion, SoftBank and Nvidia each investing $30 billion.
After completing this round, OpenAI's cash on hand will increase to about $150 billion. OpenAI says funds will mainly be used to expand computing infrastructure to meet the rapidly growing user demand.
01 Amazon's $50 Billion in Installments
As the most generous investor in this round, Amazon's promised $50 billion investment will be executed in two stages: the first installment of $15 billion is confirmed, and the remaining $35 billion will be put in place when OpenAI completes its IPO or achieves AGI.
So very soon, Altman stated he is open to going public at the right time.
Regarding AGI, according to the contract between OpenAI and Microsoft, AGI is defined as "a highly autonomous system that surpasses humans in the most economically valuable work." There is a special clause in OpenAI's charter: once AGI is achieved, Microsoft will lose access to its technology.
But Amazon isn’t just providing funds—they also signed a full set of technology cooperation agreements; Amazon will exchange its chips and cloud services for OpenAI's models and technology.
The most critical clause of their cooperation is computing power procurement.
OpenAI will, over the next eight years, pay AWS $100 billion for computing power, in addition to the already existing $38 billion contract. Much of this $100 billion will be spent on Amazon's self-developed Trainium chips. OpenAI has committed to purchasing about 2 gigawatts of Trainium computing power, including the soon-to-be-delivered Trainium3 and Trainium4 launching in 2027.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy specifically mentioned that Trainium chips offer 30%-40% better cost-performance than similar GPUs. "Now, both leading AI labs are using them."
The other lab is Anthropic, which has recently made waves with the US government.
Another product-level cooperation: OpenAI and Amazon will co-develop a "stateful runtime environment," which will run on Amazon Bedrock. This environment allows developers to call OpenAI models, maintaining context, remembering previous work, and collaborating across tools.
AWS also secured exclusive third-party distribution rights for OpenAI's enterprise platform Frontier.
There’s also a more direct cooperation: Amazon will use OpenAI’s models to optimize its own consumer applications. The two companies will jointly develop custom models for Amazon’s internal teams, covering product lines from e-commerce to smart hardware.
02 Nvidia's $30 Billion: Shareholder + Supplier
Rumors once suggested cooperation between Nvidia and OpenAI fell through, especially after Jensen Huang said investing $100 billion in OpenAI was never a promise.
But regardless, the investment eventually landed, though it’s much less than the rumored $100 billion—only $30 billion, paid in three installments.
According to announcements, the two have confirmed a new computing power cooperation: Nvidia will provide OpenAI with 3 gigawatts of dedicated inference power and 2 gigawatts for training in the Vera Rubin system—building on Hopper and Blackwell systems already running on Microsoft, Oracle Cloud, and CoreWeave.
From the perspective of computing power, 1GW equals $50 billion. Nvidia’s support for OpenAI is in fact worth far more than the rumored $100 billion.
From this angle, Nvidia is both a shareholder and OpenAI’s largest chip supplier—using "its own money" to help OpenAI buy its own chips, with most of the $30 billion investment ultimately returning to Nvidia as computing power purchases.
To sum it up in one sentence, it’s still the story of “circular financing.”
03 SoftBank's $30 Billion: IPO is Everything
Like Nvidia, SoftBank's $30 billion investment commitment is also paid in three installments.
Masayoshi Son’s strategy is straightforward: OpenAI is the most likely candidate for an AI IPO, and SoftBank needs an IPO to revitalize its Vision Fund.
Sources say this round is seen as an important step before OpenAI's IPO, which may start as early as the end of this year.
Compared to the other two investors, SoftBank also plays the role of connector.
According to sources, OpenAI is expected to receive about $10 billion in primary equity financing, with commitments to be finalized within a month, involving sovereign wealth funds and investment companies. It’s guessed these investors may be coming in through SoftBank.
04 Microsoft: No Money This Round, Status Unchanged
Facing Amazon’s entry, Microsoft and OpenAI released a joint statement today, emphasizing their partnership remains unaffected.
The statement says, Microsoft remains the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI’s stateless API, and all stateless API calls (calls that don't retain context) are hosted on Azure. This is currently the most common way to call OpenAI models.
Meanwhile, OpenAI's own products—including the newly released Frontier—will continue to be hosted on Azure. Frontier is OpenAI's newly launched enterprise platform, allowing companies to deploy AI agents themselves.
Intellectual property licensing and revenue sharing arrangements between Microsoft and OpenAI remain unchanged. However, OpenAI has the right to procure computing power from elsewhere, including large-scale infrastructure projects like "Stargate."
05 The Copy-Paste Story of "Circular Financing"
Looking at these four companies' inputs and returns together, as mentioned earlier, it’s the same “circular financing” narrative:
- Amazon puts in $50 billion, getting OpenAI's model technology authorization and $100 billion in cloud service orders in return
- Nvidia puts in $30 billion, getting OpenAI’s chip procurement commitment in return
- SoftBank puts in $30 billion, betting on exit chances via IPO
- Microsoft didn’t invest this round, but secured exclusive API rights; every time OpenAI sells an API call, Microsoft gets a share
After completing this round, OpenAI has $110 billion more in cash and has secured computing resources from three giants. The cost is locking future technology licensing and cloud service procurement to shareholders in advance.
Furthermore, both Amazon and SoftBank see OpenAI’s IPO as key to fulfilling their investment commitments.
So now, Microsoft's, Amazon's, Nvidia's, and SoftBank's names are all on OpenAI’s shareholder list—these four giants' businesses both overlap and conflict. How to balance these shareholders’ interests will be Sam Altman’s next big challenge.
06 ChatGPT Has Over 900 Million Weekly Active Users
Back to the business side, OpenAI truly needs this money right now.
Previously OpenAI had about $40 billion in cash; after this round, available funds will rise to about $150 billion. The company expects to realize positive free cash flow for the first time in 2030. Before then, most funds will go into data center operations, chip procurement, and cloud services.
The Financial Times cited financial data from sources: Projected revenue for 2025 is about $13 billion, expected to reach $30 billion this year, targeting over $60 billion in 2027, and over $280 billion in 2030. The growth curve is steep, but cost escalation is even faster.
For user data: According to OpenAI's official data, ChatGPT currently has more than 900 million weekly active users, over 50 million consumer subscribers, and over 9 million paying business users. The programming tool Codex launched this year has doubled its weekly active users since the start of the year, reaching 1.6 million.
Data growth looks good, but competitors aren’t idle.
Google’s Gemini is pressing hard in the consumer market, while Anthropic has already taken the lead in the enterprise market. OpenAI executives say by year’s end, half of revenue will come from enterprise customers—currently it’s 40%. This means in the coming quarters, OpenAI must face Anthropic head-on to win a 10% increase.
Another detail worth noting is changes in equity structure.
After this round, the value of the non-profit "OpenAI Foundation," which was separated from OpenAI in 2025, will reach more than $180 billion in OpenAI's for-profit business equity. Sources say if investor demand is strong, the foundation could sell up to $10 billion in shares for charitable purposes and hiring.
This means, after this $110 billion round, there may be another wave of OpenAI stock available for purchase on the secondary market.
Source: Tencent Tech
Risk Warning and DisclaimerThe market carries risks, investment needs caution. This article does not constitute personal investment advice, nor does it take into account the special investment goals, financial situation, or needs of individual users. Users should consider whether any opinions, views, or conclusions in this article are suitable for their particular situation. Invest at your own risk.