Japanese investor Softbank is reportedly participating for half a billion dollars in an investment round to value OpenAI at $150 billion.
The round is expected to close some time this week, the Financial Times, Reuters writes.
SoftBank’s investment will come through its second Vision Fund – a $100 billion pot amassed and managed by Masayoshi Son (pictured).
Son is participating in the round that reportedly includes Thrive Capital and Microsoft, which aims to give OpenAI $6.5 billion in new working capital.
With the recent introduction of new models o1 and o1-mini, OpenAI now has an extensive offering, which includes: GPT-4o and matching mini-version, enterprise versions, “slow but cheap” AI, o1 and o1-mini for more complex queries and various other products such as Whisper and voice assistants.
It is far from certain that this kind of billion-dollar investment will be recouped. Many of the new AI companies incur immense costs to fill data centres with hardware and only hope to eventually find enough paying customers. For Microsoft as an investor, the situation is slightly different. It already owns half of OpenAI and is as such a reseller and user of the AI service, negotiated high profit sharing and is always in the front row.
The New York Times estimates that OpenAI realised revenues of $300 million last August, up 1,700 percent since the beginning of 2023.
It’s not all good news for the ChatGPT developer. Apple chose not to participate in the round in an 11th hour decision. The company has also been beset by exits at board room level as the transition from a not-for-profit to a for-profit entity continues. Last week, CTO Mira Murati became the latest to depart. Announcing the move on X (formerly Twitter), she did not give any details on her future plans.
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