CFO Sarah Fryer told CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Tuesday that OpenAI is raising an additional $10 billion from investors as part of its historic funding round.
The fresh capital brings OpenAI’s record fundraising to “north of $120 billion,” Fryer said in an interview on “Mad Money.” This is much higher than the ChatGPIT creator’s initial target of $100 billion. OpenAI announced the first tranche of investment in late February, and it is being seen as potentially the last private fundraise before a potentially blockbuster initial public offering.
Andreessen Horowitz, DE Shaw Ventures, MGX, tpg And T. Rowe Price According to Fryer, there are partners in the new $10 billion commitment. moreover, MicrosoftOpenAI, a long-time investor in OpenAI and one of its leading computing providers, is joining this part of the funding round. While the relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI has evolved, Fryer called Microsoft “an incredible partner” and praised its CEO Satya Nadella for “getting there quickly.”
“I’m really pleased that we’ve raised money across the entire ecosystem,” Fryer told Cramer, pointing to the inclusion of venture capital firms, private equity players, mutual funds and sovereign entities. “No matter where you went, people really believed in this AI revolution and they wanted to put their money to work behind it,” he said.
Fryer’s update on Tuesday comes nearly a month after OpenAI initially announced a $110 billion raise at a $730 billion pre-money valuation. in that wave, Amazon While $50 billion invested NVIDIA and SoftBank each committed $30 billion. In addition to its investment, Amazon Multi-year partnership announced With OpenAI. The companies will create custom models that will support Amazon’s customer-facing applications. OpenAI also said it would expand its existing $38 billion agreement with Amazon’s cloud computing division to $100 billion over the next eight years.
“We are extremely excited about this deal,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told CNBC after the funding news last month. “AI is going to be everywhere. It’s changing the entire economy, and the world needs a lot of collective computing power to meet demand.”
OpenAI, which was founded in 2015, has seen unprecedented growth since launching ChatGPT in late 2022. CNBC has reported that the viral chatbot has racked up 900 million weekly active users, and the startup generated nearly $13.1 billion in revenue last year.
Disclosure: Cramer Charitable Trust owns shares of NVDA, AMZN, and MSFT.
