OpenAI’s Fund-Raising Talks Could Value Company at $150 Billion

OpenAI is in talks to raise about $6.5 billion as part of a deal that would value the company in the vicinity of $150 billion, a nearly $70 billion increase from its valuation nine months ago, according to five people with knowledge of the conversations.

The deal would make the company more valuable than any other private company with the exception of ByteDance, the maker the video-sharing app TikTok.

As recently as last week, OpenAI was looking to raise about $1 billion at a $100 billion valuation. But in the last few days, the company, which has extraordinarily high expenses because of the computing power needed to build big A.I. systems, has appeared to race past that goal.

The new funding round would be led by the investment firm Thrive Capital, which has previously invested in OpenAI. The tech giants Apple, Nvidia and Microsoft have also been part of the discussions, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the nature of the discussions.

Bloomberg reported earlier on the new valuation talks.

In late 2022, OpenAI started the artificial intelligence boom with the release of its online chatbot, ChatGPT, inciting a global surge in funding for start-ups that built similar technology. Interest in such companies dropped this summer as a series of prominent companies all but disappeared into wealthier and more powerful A.I. companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon.

But OpenAI, backed by $13 billion from Microsoft and with name recognition far beyond its start-up rivals, has continued to build on the frenzy of the ChatGPT release. And its new, rapidly expanding investment round is a statement on the urgency the tech industry still places on artificial intelligence.