AI research organization OpenAI is in talks for a $40 billion funding round, according to CNBC which cited anonymous sources. Softbank is in discussion to invest between $15 and $25 billion, which would make it the tech company’s biggest financial backer.
SoftBank was also a leading investor in OpenAI’s previous funding round in October 2024. The round was led by venture capital firm Thrive Capital and included big name investors Nvidia, Fidelity, Khosla Ventures and Microsoft.
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Apple, on the other hand, dropped out of the round just days prior. Softbank is a leading player in the world of tech investment, and has shown interest in several AI-related tech companies, which may complement OpenAI’s work. This includes investments in robotics companies like Boston Dynamics and AI-driven companies, which could overlap with OpenAI’s research into language models and other advanced AI technologies.
All this has come shortly after the rise of new competition for OpenAI, in the form of Chinese startup DeepSeek, which recently launched an inexpensive AI model. This ended up drawing worldwide attention by challenging expectations about the cost of AI.
While OpenAI CEO Sam Altman initially praised DeepSeek for its “impressive and cheap” reasoning model, he has since gone on the offensive, accusing the Chinese company of using OpenAI’s model to train their R1 reasoning model.
Earlier this week, OpenAI claimed that DeepSeek reduced costs by leveraging outputs from ChatGPT. Microsoft has also joined OpenAI’s investigation into whether DeepSeek obtained the technology in an unauthorized manner.
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OpenAI has also recently been in the news over claims that it has developed Artificial Generative Intelligence (AGI). While some of Altman’s comments initially suggested that OpenAI’s o3-mini reached the milestone of incorporating AGI, he had since refuted the claims asking netizens to “cut their expectations.”