The money-burning OpenAI is financing again! With SoftBank adding another $3 billion, and NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Amazon joining forces to invest.

Media reports citing informed sources revealed that NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA.US), Microsoft Corporation (MSFT.US), and Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN.US) are in talks to invest up to $60 billion as part of a major new round of financing for global AI leader OpenAI. The sources indicated that the developers of ChatGPT are planning to raise $50 billion or more in this round of funding, which would lead to a valuation in the range of $750 billion to $830 billion, placing it in the super unicorn category. According to media reports, existing investor NVIDIA Corporation is in discussions to invest up to $30 billion, while Microsoft Corporation, also an existing investor, may increase its investment, expected to be less than $10 billion. In addition, Amazon.com, Inc., as a new investor in OpenAI, may invest over $10 billion, possibly even exceeding $20 billion. The sources mentioned that the scale of Amazon.com, Inc.'s investment in OpenAI may depend on other major transactions the two companies are negotiating. OpenAI is in initial discussions to raise at least $10 billion from Amazon.com, Inc. and use Amazon.com, Inc.'s self-developed AI computing infrastructure. This move is seen as a potential victory for the online retail and cloud computing giant to expand its influence in AI computing power and compete fiercely with NVIDIA Corporation's Blackwell AI GPUs. The two companies previously announced an agreement, with Amazon.com, Inc. providing $38 billion in AI cloud computing infrastructure to the AI startup over seven years. These investments will be in addition to new investments beyond the $30 billion planned by SoftBank Group Corp., the Japanese investment giant led by legendary investor Masayoshi Son. Before announcing the reinvestment in OpenAI, SoftBank had already made multiple rounds of investments in the company. Reports dating back to September 2024 mentioned that SoftBank's Vision Fund invested $500 million in OpenAI's previous funding round, followed by an agreement on March 31, 2025, to co-invest up to $40 billion with OpenAI, ultimately completing the investment agreement in December 2025 through multiple rounds of investment. Both SoftBank and OpenAI are essential participants in the "Stargate" project, a plan worth up to $500 billion aimed at building massive AI data centers for training and reasoning within the United States. The rush to build these data centers has led to commitments from massive tech giants like Oracle Corporation, Microsoft Corporation, and Meta Platforms (META.US), to invest unprecedented amounts of capital in these projects. These projects require immense AI chips, power, cooling equipment, and massive server clusters, bringing in well-funded partners to share the risks. Since these tech giants issued large bonds in November and the leading cloud computing giant Oracle Corporation failed to deliver satisfactory performance reports after heavily investing in AI computing clusters, the heavy capital expenditures by these tech giants have raised serious concerns about what will happen if these investments fail to bring adequate returns, exacerbating fears of the impending bursting of the "AI bubble." In recent months, Wall Street analysts have been warning that the AI bubble is accelerating, partly due to the cyclical nature of large-scale investment transactions - some companies invest heavily in potential customers to maintain their product spend. Continuously raising increasingly massive new funding to support the GPT series AI large model training process and immensely large AI inference workloads is crucial for OpenAI to cover the rising costs of training and running its cutting-edge AI models, as competition from Alphabet subsidiary Alphabet Inc. Class C continues to intensify, pushing OpenAI to accelerate the release of the highly anticipated "AGI" or "ASI." In October, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated that OpenAI's goal is to build a 30-gigawatt AI computing infrastructure at a cost of $1.4 trillion. He mentioned that he hopes OpenAI can add 1 gigawatt of computing power per week eventually - a huge and seemingly unattainable goal, as each gigawatt currently comes with AI capital costs exceeding $400 billion. NVIDIA Corporation's Billion-Dollar Gamble on OpenAI Since the global popularity of ChatGPT in early 2023 triggered enterprises and governments to invest heavily in AI, the "AI chip hegemon" NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA.US) has been raking in money amidst this unprecedented AI boom. Its solid revenue and operating profits in recent years have laid a strong cash flow foundation. Therefore, as the global AI infrastructure construction thrives and AI applications like DeepSeek, ChatGPT, and Claude become increasingly powerful and rapidly infiltrate various industries, NVIDIA Corporation has launched the "AI ecosystem integration phase" with huge investments. The moat built by this AI chip giant has become a "fortress," and the "NVIDIA AI Empire" seems impregnable. According to top Wall Street analysts, NVIDIA Corporation's move towards AI integration is mainly aimed at strengthening its dominance in the AI computing infrastructure market and expanding its moat through strategic investment cooperation and potential acquisitions. In September 2025, NVIDIA Corporation announced an investment of up to $100 billion in leading AI company OpenAI to support the construction of a new generation of data centers and AI infrastructure. The two parties plan to jointly build a super AI data center with a computing power scale of at least 10 gigawatts (GW), equivalent to the total output power of 10 traditional nuclear power plants. This unprecedented cooperation highlights the unmatched demand for AI computing infrastructure brought about by the acceleration of generative AI tools like ChatGPT penetrating industries worldwide. The $100 billion investment plan mentioned above comes from the infrastructure strategic cooperation announced by NVIDIA Corporation. It remains to be seen if the reported $30 billion NVIDIA Corporation investment is defined as the "initial execution" of the $100 billion investment commitment, as media reports and related sources have not yet confirmed.