OpenAI Closes $122 Billion Funding Round at $852 Billion Valuation, Raises $3 Billion From Retail Investors

OpenAI has completed a $122 billion funding round led by Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank, valuing the artificial intelligence company at $852 billion and opening a portion of the raise to retail investors for the first time, TechCrunch reported Monday. The $3 billion retail tranche represents a notable departure for a company that has historically restricted access to institutional and strategic investors. The move signals OpenAI's growing interest in broadening its capital base ahead of an anticipated initial public offering, which the company has discussed publicly without committing to a timeline. The total raise is the largest private funding round ever disclosed for a technology company. It dwarfs OpenAI's previous raise of $40 billion in early 2025 and reflects the continued surge in investor appetite for exposure to frontier AI development despite growing competition from Chinese models and questions about the long-term defensibility of any single lab's position. SoftBank's participation in the lead group is significant. The Japanese conglomerate has bet heavily on AI infrastructure through its Vision Fund and its backing of Arm Holdings, and its co-lead role alongside Amazon and Nvidia suggests the three investors see OpenAI as central to their own AI strategies. Nvidia's dual role as both a key hardware supplier to OpenAI and now a major investor creates an unusually close structural alignment between the company and its chip vendor. Amazon, through AWS, is a major cloud infrastructure partner for OpenAI competitors including Anthropic. OpenAI declined to comment on the reported IPO timeline. The company converted from a nonprofit to a capped-profit structure in 2024, a change that was a prerequisite for raising capital at this scale.