OpenAI raises record funding, valuation nears one trillion.

While everyone was still reeling from the Claude Code leak, OpenAI has once again grabbed headlines. Just now, OpenAI officially announced the completion of a $122 billion funding round. A single private placement of $122 billion is unprecedented in human business history. Following the funding, OpenAI's valuation stands at $852 billion, just one step away from a trillion dollars, and the company has only been around for ten years. It's worth noting that when this round of financing was initially announced in February of this year, the committed amount was $110 billion, but it ultimately closed with $12 billion more, indicating that more institutions followed suit than expected. It is widely believed that this is OpenAI's last large-scale private placement before its IPO at the end of the year, and the listing schedule is becoming increasingly clear.

https://openai.com/index/accelerating-the-next-phase-ai/

Where did the money come from?

The main investors in this round of financing are Amazon ($50 billion), Nvidia ($30 billion), and SoftBank ($30 billion). SoftBank also partnered with a16z and D.E. Shaw. The investment was co-led by several institutions. Microsoft, a long-time partner, continued to invest, but this time the specific amount was not disclosed; it is only known that as of the end of last year, Microsoft's cumulative investment in OpenAI had exceeded $13 billion. In addition, OpenAI also opened its doors to wealthy individual investors through banking channels for the first time, raising approximately $3 billion. ARK Invest's flagship innovation ETF, with a size of $6 billion, also announced the inclusion of OpenAI, holding approximately 3% of its portfolio; this is the fund's first investment in a non-public company. In fact, some funds managed by T. Rowe Price and Fidelity already held small amounts of OpenAI shares; ARK's involvement further opens up channels for ordinary people to participate. In short, almost the entire tech industry is supporting OpenAI. But upon closer examination, the logic is actually quite simple: OpenAI will use this money to buy Nvidia chips and rent servers from Amazon and Microsoft. By investing, these giants are essentially securing the world's largest computing power customers in advance. This round of financing is less about confidence in OpenAI and more about a sure-fire way to make money. For OpenAI, this money is more like a final major investment before its IPO. The financial figures are indeed impressive: nearly 900 million weekly active users, over 50 million paying users, $13.1 billion in revenue last year, and a peak monthly income of $2 billion, with a growth rate four times that of internet giants like Google and Meta at the same stage. However, OpenAI is not yet profitable, and its cash burn rate shows no signs of slowing down. Why shut down Sora? Before and after this round of financing, OpenAI's product development pace did not stagnate. They released GPT-5.4, the most powerful version to date, with significant improvements in multitasking and workflow performance. The code generation tool Codex has also been upgraded from a feature to an independent programming agent, currently boasting over 2 million weekly active users, a fivefold increase in the past three months, with a monthly growth rate maintained at around 70%. The performance on the enterprise side is also noteworthy. Currently, enterprise services account for over 40% of OpenAI's total revenue, and it is expected to reach parity with consumer services by the end of 2026. The API processes over 15 billion tokens per minute, search usage has nearly tripled in the past year, and the advertising pilot project achieved annualized revenue exceeding $100 million within six weeks of its launch. This is also the signal OpenAI hopes to send to the outside world: Revenue streams are becoming increasingly diversified, with ChatGPT subscription fees being just one part of it. However, right next to this sea of ​​positive data, Sora quietly went offline. When Sora was first released, it certainly caused quite a stir in the film and creative industries. Generating videos with just one sentence, and the image quality was quite realistic, many people felt this was the most exciting aspect of AI technology. However, the computational cost of video generation is far higher than that of text generation. Every AI inference, every piece of text generation, and every frame of video rendering consumes expensive GPU computing cycles and electricity. There is no free intelligence; every use is a real drain on resources. While users may find it fun, few are willing to pay a high price for it. According to the Wall Street Journal, one of the reasons OpenAI chose to shut down Sora was that it was burning through approximately $1 million per day, while its user base plummeted from 1 million at launch to less than 500,000. When retention data is poor and the commercialization path is unclear, there's naturally no reason to continue this money-burning venture. Thus, before reality was even disrupted, Sora was already gone. Shutting down Sora was just the beginning. OpenAI is also examining other expensive, slow-return areas, preparing for further contraction; concentrating computing power on text models, code generation, and enterprise services—areas with stable cash flow—is also OpenAI's way of telling Wall Street: we know, and need to know, how to make money. From "Changing the World" to "Utilities" OpenAI was founded in 2015 with the initial vision of ensuring that general artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. In 2019, to raise sufficient R&D funds, the company transitioned to a "limited-profit" model, establishing a for-profit subsidiary and accepting a $1 billion investment from Microsoft. While the operating entity became commercialized, the non-profit OpenAI Foundation still holds approximately 26% of the equity, nominally continuing its original philanthropic mission. One sentence in OpenAI's official fundraising statement is noteworthy: "Building the infrastructure layer of intelligence itself." These few words reveal OpenAI's shift in self-positioning. Previously, they focused on refreshing the outside world's understanding of AI with stunning demos; now, they aim to step back and become an indispensable underlying tool for businesses and individuals. They call this direction "super app," planning to integrate ChatGPT, Codex, search, browser capabilities, and more into a unified entry point, primarily targeting developers and enterprise users, eliminating the need to switch between multiple tools. The underlying logic is to let consumer habits naturally drive enterprise purchasing, with the two businesses mutually reinforcing each other. An average user might find it novel today and unsubscribe tomorrow, but a company whose core business runs on OpenAI models is unlikely to cut ties so easily; the latter is the kind of customer loyalty Wall Street truly wants to see. Over the past few years, OpenAI has consistently delivered groundbreaking innovations—new models, new products, new possibilities—one after another. But judging from this round of financing and the shutdown of Sora, that exciting phase may truly be coming to an end. What follows is likely to be more like a mature business: some manage computing power, some manage data, and some manage sales; everyone focuses on their own area, emphasizing cost control and commercialization. OpenAI can never go back to what it was before, but perhaps it never intended to.