San Francisco:
OpenAi, the creator of Chatgpt, tries to pick up $ 40 billion in a fresh financing round that would appreciate the startup with a stunning $ 340 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
The Japanese Softbank leads the investment round and is in conversation to invest $ 15-25 billion in the deal that would make it the biggest financial backer of the chatgpt maker.
The reports came after the Chinese startup Deepseek had fueled a panic this week with a powerful new chatbot developed against a fraction of the costs of his American competitors, who had a blow to markets.
The Softbank investment was first reported by the Financial Times.
The investment plan comes only three months after OpenAi closed its earlier financing round that appreciated the company at $ 157 billion.
Doubling the appreciation would be unprecedented in the history of Silicon Valley and signals the enormous amounts needed to completely rebuild world-crowding AI models, much of it on advanced computing and infrastructure.
Softbank and OpenAi are part of the Stargate Drive announced by US President Donald Trump to invest up to $ 500 billion in artificial intelligence infrastructure in the United States.
The new funds would partly go to help OpenAi to fulfill around $ 18 billion for Stargate, the magazine said.
In addition, the investment of the Japanese company would come on top of its dedication of more than $ 15 billion in Stargate, said the FT, who mentioned people with direct knowledge of the negotiations.
“Ultimately, the Japanese company could spend more than $ 40 billion on his partnership with OpenAi,” said the report.
Softbank was not immediately available for comment when contacted by AFP. OpenAi did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Shares in Softbank rose three percent in Tokyo trade on Thursday.
The company, founded by the Japanese Tycoon Masayoshi Son, made spectacularly successful early bets on Yahoo! And Alibaba in the nineties, but some of his other investments have bombed.
Abu Dhabi and others protect enormous financing from Saudi Aarabia, Son – an early backer from Trump – has tried to turn to AI, helped by the importance of soft bank in chip designer arm.
Elon Musk has poured contempt on Stargate openly and says this month on X that the most important investors “don’t have the money”.
The richest man in the world was an early investor in OpenAi and has long had a feud with the founder Sam Altman, who called the comments of the founder of the Tesla “wrong”.
(Except for the headline, this story was not edited by NDTV staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.)