OpenAI is moving toward a private fundraising round worth more than $100 billion, with its valuation nearing $850 billion. According to the source material, Amazon is expected to commit $50 billion, SoftBank and Nvidia about $30 billion each, while Microsoft will also participate, with allocations targeted for completion by the end of February 2026. The deal would rank as the largest single private financing in business history.
The size of the round is only part of the story. OpenAI was founded on December 11, 2015 as a nonprofit organization backed by figures including Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, and Greg Brockman, with an initial pledge of $1 billion. Its original promise was clear: advance digital intelligence in the way most likely to benefit humanity, share research openly, and put safety ahead of profit.
Rising model costs broke the original structure
That framework ran into a cost curve it could not absorb. The source says training a frontier AI model in 2015 cost only hundreds of thousands of dollars. By 2019, GPT-2 had pushed that into the million-dollar range. GPT-3, released in 2020, was estimated to have cost between $4.6 million and $12 million to train, and GPT-4 crossed $100 million by 2023. Each generation demanded more compute, more capital, and more infrastructure.
In March 2019, OpenAI responded by creating a capped-profit subsidiary. Investors could receive returns, but only up to 100 times their investment, with gains above that level flowing back to the nonprofit parent. Microsoft followed with a $1 billion investment in July 2019. By January 2023, its cumulative investment had reached $13 billion, giving it rights to 49% of OpenAI’s profit distributions. The legal design still carried a mission-first label. The financial model had already become deeply commercial.
The technical shift was just as notable. In 2021, OpenAI stopped open-sourcing its core models. GPT-3 was made available through a paid API, but model weights were no longer released. The company kept “Open” in its name, while the practical meaning of that word narrowed sharply.
The five-day board crisis exposed who held power
On November 17, 2023, OpenAI’s board removed CEO Sam Altman, saying he had not been consistently candid in communications with directors. The reversal came fast. Satya Nadella publicly backed Altman, more than 700 employees signed a letter threatening to leave and join Microsoft, and investors pushed the board to change course.
By November 22, Altman was back. Board members Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley exited, and Bret Taylor and Larry Summers joined the new board. Those five days turned OpenAI’s governance tensions into a visible fact: on paper, the nonprofit board sat at the top of the structure; in practice, capital, labor, and strategic partners carried more immediate force.
After the 2025 restructuring, the cash demand only grew
The source says OpenAI completed its final transition on October 28, 2025. The nonprofit parent was reorganized as the OpenAI Foundation, while the operating entity became OpenAI Group PBC. Ownership was split with Microsoft at 27%, the foundation at 26%, and employees plus other investors at 47%. Elon Musk’s effort to stop the restructuring failed after a judge denied his injunction request in March 2025.
The reason fresh capital remains essential is the company’s spending profile. OpenAI’s annualized revenue in 2025 reached $20 billion, up from $6 billion a year earlier, and ChatGPT surpassed 300 million monthly active users. Yet cloud computing costs alone exceeded $8.5 billion, while total cash burn for the year was about $17 billion. Its own financial projections put expected losses for 2026 at $14 billion, with cumulative losses reaching $115 billion by 2029 and cash-flow breakeven not expected until late 2029 or 2030.
The investor list reflects that structure. Amazon is one of OpenAI’s cloud providers, Nvidia is its key GPU supplier, and Microsoft is both a major shareholder and Azure partner. As part of the new deal, OpenAI is also set to expand its use of Amazon chips and cloud services. That leaves a tight loop in place: the suppliers funding OpenAI are also positioned to receive a portion of that money back through infrastructure and compute spending. The “AI” in OpenAI remains at the center of that machine. The “Open” belongs mostly to its founding pitch.