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Investing.com-- OpenAI said on Monday it will raise $40 billion in a new funding round led by Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp. (TYO:9984) that values the artificial intelligence startup at $300 billion, making it among the most valuable private firms.
The company said it intends to deliver “increasingly powerful tools” for its some 500 million weekly users, and that the new funding from Softbank (OTC:SFTBY) also furthered its progress towards artificial general intelligence.
OpenAI’s premier ChatGPT tool, which is one of the most-used AI chatbots in the world, saw viral popularity over the past week after a recent update drastically improved its image generation capabilities.
The new $300 billion valuation is substantially bigger than the $157 billion OpenAI was valued at in October, when it closed a $6.6 billion funding round.
News of the Softbank investment was reported earlier in March. OpenAI and the Japanese technology conglomerate are also set to lead a $500 billion project to build more AI data center infrastructure in the U.S., called Project Stargate.
Softbank’s investment is expected to make the Japanese firm OpenAI’s biggest backer after Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), which has backed the AI startup extensively since 2019.
The capital raise comes amid the increasing popularity of AI in business and consumer applications over the past two years.
OpenAI had kicked off the AI race with the release of ChatGPT in late-2022. The app set a record for reaching 100 million monthly active users in just two months.