Author: Nancy, PANews

Last night, the air in Silicon Valley was filled with the smell of burning money.

With $110 billion in financing and a post-investment valuation of $840 billion, OpenAI has thrown this deep-sea bomb, which not only refreshes the ceiling for private tech companies but also brings the global AI race into an extremely brutal "folded space".

This is no longer a romantic story about tech entrepreneurship; it is a game concerning national fortune, computing power hegemony, and the direction of civilization.

$100 billion pumped into AI, OpenAI becomes the most expensive experiment

In the history of technology, OpenAI has created a shocking financing record.

On February 27, OpenAI announced that with a valuation of $730 billion, it successfully secured $110 billion in a new round of massive financing, directly lifting its post-investment valuation to $840 billion. Compared to the $40 billion financing from the same period last year, OpenAI's current round of financing has multiplied several times, setting a record for private tech company financing, and the capital's bet has shifted from "betting on the future" to "locking in the future in advance".

What does $110 billion mean?

This figure exceeds the annual GDP of several medium-sized countries, including Kenya, Venezuela, Luxembourg, and Panama. Even the global oil heavyweight Saudi Arabia has an annual GDP of about $1 trillion. One round of financing from OpenAI is equivalent to about one-tenth of what Saudi Arabia produces in a year.

This amount is roughly equivalent to Nvidia's total annual revenue, nearly half of SpaceX's current valuation, and is the sum of the financing amounts for internet giants from the golden age like Uber, Didi, Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent, and Meituan.

In the AI landscape, a single financing scale of $110 billion undoubtedly marks a watershed moment, overnight changing the entire industry's financing game rules. By 2025, the total financing for AI startups exceeded $200 billion, setting a historical high, and OpenAI took away more than half of the chips in just one night.

Such a scale of financing intensifies the arms race in the AI sector. Leading competitors in the industry must follow up with larger-scale financing, or they will gradually fall behind in the competition for computing power, models, and talent. However, the expansion of financing scale has also brought higher valuation pressure and redemption demands. As a large amount of capital is concentrated and siphoned away, financing windows are bound to narrow sharply, reducing the negotiation space for valuations of small and medium-sized AI companies, extending their survival cycle, and further raising the risks of industry centralization, which could lead to valuation bubbles, resource monopolies, and declining innovation vitality.

Therefore, when capital bets such a huge amount, AI is no longer just the protagonist of the tech narrative; it has truly transformed into the main asset of the capital age, becoming a battlefield for giant capital games.

The entities backing this check totaling $110 billion are Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank, gathering computing power, channels, and capital.

But this is not a simple financing. Rather than being a financial blood transfusion, it is more a strategic gamble surrounding the prospects of AGI, deeply binding technology, computing power, and commercial interests.

Amazon is the most generous contributor in this round, being not only an important investor for OpenAI but also a strategic partner for many years.

In the total investment commitment of $50 billion, the first $15 billion has been confirmed for investment, and the remaining $35 billion will be allocated in the coming months based on specific conditions. Trigger conditions include achieving or reaching AGI milestones or advancing an IPO by the end of the year. Based on this, both parties have signed an expansion agreement for 8 years, totaling $100 billion.

This model of exchanging capital stakes for future computing power needs and technological priority is similar to OpenAI's previous cooperation logic with Microsoft. It is worth mentioning that OpenAI and Microsoft have special terms; once AGI is achieved, Microsoft will lose access to the relevant technology (Note: In the new agreement signed in 2025, Microsoft's IP rights to the models and products have been extended to 2032).

SoftBank Group is investing $30 billion, which will be delivered in three installments in April, July, and October 2026. This staggered arrangement is interpreted as a form of risk hedging. SoftBank's role in this round of financing is not just providing funds. Market news indicates that OpenAI expects to raise another $10 billion from investors before March, with those investors including sovereign wealth funds and investment institutions, which may push the overall valuation to $850 billion, and these potential investors are likely to use SoftBank as a bridge to enter.

SoftBank's founder Masayoshi Son has been frequently betting on AI in recent years and has publicly stated that "the AI revolution is the most exciting and dynamic front trend of the future." Son visited Trump's Mar-a-Lago at the end of 2024, promising to invest $100 billion in the US, and last year officially announced participation in "Star Gate," an AI infrastructure investment project in the US up to $500 billion, serving as chairman of the project. In this project, SoftBank is responsible for financial responsibilities, while OpenAI is responsible for operational responsibilities. At the same time, to support OpenAI, Son even went as far as selling off Nvidia stocks "with tears" last year and using that money for additional investments in OpenAI, making him one of OpenAI's largest external investors.

Nvidia, which had long been anticipated to invest, shelled out $30 billion this time, replacing the $100 billion long-term cooperation commitment agreed upon last year, also allowing OpenAI to monopolize Nvidia's production capacity early and creating an exclusive "internal circulation system." Any outside competitor would have to wait until 2030 just to queue for purchasing graphics cards.

This circular model is seen as a typical supplier financing, essentially locking in long-term commercial cooperation through capital binding among tech giants. It can be said that in this AI race, capital is no longer just a financial tool but a chip to secure computing power resources and seize discourse power.

Behind the massive capital influx is not only a collective bet on the AGI track but also an acknowledgment of OpenAI's business growth.

According to official disclosures, OpenAI's flagship product ChatGPT currently has over 900 million weekly active users, while this number was about 200 million 18 months ago; the number of personal subscription users has exceeded 50 million, setting a historic high, with a paid penetration rate exceeding 5%; there are over 9 million paid commercial users, including a large number of enterprises and government agencies using ChatGPT or building products based on the OpenAI API.

However, behind the rapid growth is an increasingly expanding cash burn. OpenAI's revenue in 2025 is about $13 billion, with cash expenditures of $8 billion, which means that for every dollar earned, about $0.62 of rigid cash outflow is burned. According to The Information, OpenAI disclosed internal forecasts to investors showing that cumulative cash consumption is expected to reach $115 billion by the end of 2029, and it is projected to break even only by 2030. Meanwhile, OpenAI recently also disclosed plans to invest a total of approximately $600 billion in computing power construction by 2030.

This means that if significant profitability cannot be achieved in the short term, this astonishing "burn rate" will force OpenAI to continuously rely on blood transfusions to survive.

But more critically, OpenAI's once-impenetrable moat is showing signs of loosening.

According to data from mobile analytics company Apptopia, ChatGPT's app market share has dropped from 69.1% in January 2025 to 45.3% in 2026. At the same time, the market share of Google's Gemini chatbot application has risen from 14.7% to 25.2%; Musk's Grok has risen to 15.2%, up from only 1.6% in the same period last year.

With the profitability problem and strong competitors pressing in, an IPO may become OpenAI's "lifeline".

Currently, OpenAI's IPO timeline may be approaching. According to a recent report from the Wall Street Journal citing informed sources, OpenAI is paving the way for an IPO in Q4 of 2026 and has been in contact with Wall Street investment banks, hiring a chief accounting officer and a head of investor relations. Its founder Sam Altman has recently disclosed that they will consider going public at the right time. If it comes to fruition, this will be one of the most important IPO events in the tech industry in 2026.

This means that Sam Altman is running blind on the narrow bridge to an IPO. This is not only a race of technology but also a life-and-death speed with the patience of capital.

And this target of an IPO by the end of the year may be the peak of this AI bubble, or perhaps the true beginning of the AGI era. But before that, everyone is sitting at this most expensive gambling table, holding their breath, waiting for the hole cards to be revealed.

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