OpenAI may be on the cusp of securing a new stockpile of cash to burn through, with the business looking to secure $100 billion in funding from a range of tech and investment firms, Bloomberg reports. The company is reportedly seeking a valuation of around $850 billion, according to the outlet's sources. With $1.4 trillion in pledged expenditure over the next eight years, OpenAI has enormous commitments to meet. While OpenAI is also preparing for an IPO later this year, its plans have not gone without criticism, with some reportedly coming from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang himself.
AI's circular strategy
The circular nature of AI investment and infrastructure deals has been apparent since the earliest months of 2025, and it played out throughout most of last year. Nvidia invested in companies that often bought Nvidia chips, while tech firms investing in AI developers often sold those same companies cloud computing capacity.
This latest tranche of funding for OpenAI appears to be much of the same. The key players in the deal are Amazon, Nvidia, Microsoft, and SoftBank, all of which have a mix of deals with one another and OpenAI already.
Amazon's investment is rumored to be up to $50 billion, with the condition of that investment being that OpenAI uses more of its chips and cloud computing services. SoftBank is reportedly considering a $30 billion investment, while Nvidia's is said to be $20 billion, a fifth of the total $100 billion alliance made in September 2025.
Although Microsoft's name was also thrown around by Bloomberg's sources, there was no speculation on what kind of financial contribution it would make to this round of funding. All companies involved are expected to finalize their investments by the end of February.
As with other major investment deals, even the rumored news of this one sent stock prices rising. AI industry sceptics would suggest this is one more example of why the AI industry is in a bubble: Investments that haven't happened yet generate financial returns for these companies, even without any clear path to profitability.
Projecting confidence
It's been a while since any of the big AI companies have made any enormous, headline-grabbing announcements. Indeed, a lot of the meta-story surrounding AI in recent weeks has been a crisis of confidence. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was seeming wobbled by the "slop" moniker, and bubble name-calling; Nvidia's Jensen Huang specifying the details of its $100 billion partnership with OpenAI, and an increasing number of studies suggesting AI isn't helping improve productivity much, if at all.
OpenAI is even projected to run out of cash entirely by 2027. But this week, the AI Impact Summit in India is being held, where all the major players in the industry are speaking. OpenAI's Sam Altman is there, as is Anthropic's Dario Amodei. OpenAI also released GPT 5.3 Codex, which is the first of OpenAI's deployments that marks a move away from being reliant solely upon Nvidia chips.
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