Tag: money

OpenAI officially closes $122 billion funding round at $852B valuation

OpenAI is by far the most used and valued AI lab, with 40% of revenue from enterprise customers. (Picture: Adobe)
Ahead of a possible stock market debut, the ChatGPT maker is also saying that it will be available in «several» market-traded ETFs managed by Ark Invest.

This will be the first time OpenAI can be traded by individual investors, and over $3 billion is being raised by banks.

The round is led by «strategic partners» Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank, as previously reported, and OpenAI is committed to consume 2 gigawatts of compute from AWS as part of the deal.

In its announcement, OpenAI brags that ChatGPT has «more than 900 million weekly active users, and over 50 million subscribers. ChatGPT has 6x the monthly web visits and mobile sessions than the next largest AI app, while total AI time spent is 4x the next largest AI app.»

— These are not just growth milestones — they show that frontier AI is becoming part of everyday life for people around the world, they say.

At the same time, OpenAI is openly confirming that they are indeed building a super app, that will combine ChatGPT, Codex, browsing, and «broader agentic capabilities»

Read more: OpenAI’s announcement, CNBC, and TechCrunch.

Mistral raises $830 million in debt to build data center just outside Paris

It’s a big investment for European AI, but significantly lower than what US AI labs are spending. (Picture: Mistral)
The new 44 MW data center will be powered by 13,800 Nvidia chips, and should be online by the second quarter of 2026.

The French AI lab is hoping to secure 200 megawatts of capacity by the end of 2027, Reuters reports.

— Scaling our infrastructure ​in Europe is ⁠critical to empower our customers and to ensure AI innovation and autonomy remain at the heart ​of Europe, says Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch.

The news comes hot on the heels of Mistral’s February startup of a €1.2 billion data center in Sweden, according to CNBC.

Mistral is the largest European AI lab, has contracts with the French armed forces, and has secured $3.1 billion in funding so far, TechCrunch writes.

Read more: Reuters, CNBC and TechCrunch.

AI lab Thinking Machines gets investment, gigawatt compute from Nvidia

With no product and an experienced team, Murati’s Thinking Machines lab is rounding up funding. (Picture: Nvidia)
Founded by OpenAI’s former Chief Technology Officer after the 2024 leadership spat, Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines has scored a big deal with Nvidia.

The startup has entered into «a multiyear strategic partnership» that will provide them with both money and significant Vera Rubin compute early next year — about the same level the first version of Grok was trained on.

The parties are not disclosing a sum total, but 1 GW of Nvidia compute is estimated to be worth about $50 billion, Reuters notes.

Murati’s AI lab has been largely secretive about its actual products, releasing a configurable API in December 2025 and vowing to make AI models more accessible, capable and, yes, customizable.

They raised $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation from Andreessen Horowitz and Nvidia in July 2025.

Read more: Joint press release, writeups on Reuters, CNBC and TechCrunch.

Jensen Huang says Nvidia’s investment opportunity in AI labs is closing

Huang figures the privately owned AI labs era might be finished. (Picture: Nvidia)
The Nvidia CEO says the opportunity to invest might soon end, Reuters reports.

The reason for this is straightforward, suspecting that Anthropic and OpenAI going public «later this year» will shutter the window to private equity deals.

The latest deal to fund OpenAI with $30 billion «might be the last time» to «invest in a consequential company like this,» Huang admits.

Nvidia has invested some $130 billion in OpenAI in two rounds, the recent straight up investment, and one circular deal where they paid $100 billion in return for OpenAI buying $100 billion in chips from them.

Likewise, Nvidia was an investor in a November funding round for Anthropic, buying $15 billion in shares from the company.

Read more: Reuters, CNBC and TechCrunch.

OpenAI raises record funding round: $110 billion invested at $840B valuation

At more than double the cost of last years record deal, the funding highly values OpenAI by investors, according to Reuters.

Amazon invested $50 billion, Nvidia put up $30 billion and SoftBank shelled out $30 billion, agreeing to a $840 billion valuation, the largest of any frontier AI lab by far.

«Strategic partnership» with Amazon
Amazon’s deal structure is slightly different, as it comes in the terms of a strategic partnership where OpenAI will receive $15 billion up front, and then qualify for the rest $35 billion «over the coming months.»

OpenAI has committed to using 2 gigawatts of capacity on AWS’ Trainium platform and will make their models available on Amazon’s services.

None of this is said to change OpenAI’s relationship with Microsoft, OpenAI says in a release.

At the same time, OpenAI’s Nick Turley says they have surpassed 900 million weekly users and has 50 million paying subscribers, up from roughly 800 million before.

Read more: Sama’s thank you thread, writeups on Reuters, CNBC

Nvidia’s Data Center unit up 75% YoY, Q4 profits beat estimates yet again

Markets have become accustomed to roaring earnings beats from Nvidia. (Picture: Nvidia)
Markets were lackluster on the last quarterly report of $68.13 billion in revenue for the AI chipmaker, as revenue growth seems to be slipping, Reuters reports.

The full year revenue hit $215.9 billion, up 65% year-on-year, with Data Center revenue hitting a record of $62.3 billion — which is responsible for their AI chips.

Nvidia also raised its guidance for Q1 2026, and is certainly not seeing any slowdown:

Continue reading “Nvidia’s Data Center unit up 75% YoY, Q4 profits beat estimates yet again”

The hundreds of billions in AI investments flowing into India

The Indian AI Summit was a great success for the country, securing hundreds of billions in investments. (Picture: AI Impact Summit)
After the conclusion of the Indian AI Impact Summit, the chips are in on massive investments into data centers in the country.

It’s OpenAI’s second biggest market and looks set for a massive buildout of AI capacity in the years leading up to 2035.

Adani dishing out the dollars
First out is the Adani Group, pledging $100 billion to build data centers by 2035, which they expect to trigger «an additional $150 billion in secondary investments.» This should scale their data center portfolio from 2 gigawatts to 5 GW.

Continue reading “The hundreds of billions in AI investments flowing into India”

Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs raises $1 billion for spatial intelligence, world models

Marble can make intricate 3D worlds from prompts or pictures, and Autodesk wants in. (Picture: World Labs)
As «the godmother of AI’s» world-building Marble model is taking off, some say World Labs has hit a $5 billion valuation, according to Reuters.

Most notably, they collected $200 million in funding from Autodesk — which makes 3D CAD software in a somewhat overlapping fashion.

They will now officially become advisors to World Labs, and are starting up a collaboration, writes TechCrunch.

— You might want to take an object that you’ve designed in our [platform], and put it in a context that you create through one of [World Labs’] prompts, says Daron Green, Autodesk’s chief scientist, to the website.

World Labs themselves have not provided a valuation from the funding round.

Read more: Autodesk’s announcement, World Lab’s announcement. More detail from TechCrunch, Reuters.

Ireland enacts basic income for artists, says it creates more than they spend

Basic income schemes are closely watched in case AI supplants jobs at scale. (Picture: Images Money, CC BY 2.0)
After a pilot scheme lasting from 2022-25 with basic income for artists, the Irish Government is moving to make it permanent.

2,000 eligible artists will be randomly selected to get €325 per week, after the pilot found that for every €1 invested, society received €1.39 in return.

It’s not enough to live on, but it is enough to see artists through their arts without taking on side gigs and onerous secondary jobs.

During the pilot, artists reported they had more time for their art, produced more work, experienced a boost in well-being, had greater life satisfaction and that it reduced their anxiety.

— The BIA [Basic Income for Artists] pilot research has consistently demonstrated both the positive impact it has had on those in receipt of it and how difficult it is to work as an artist in Ireland, says Culture Minister Patrick O’Donovan.

This is the first such officially enacted Government-based basic income program in the world, O’Donovan says.

Read more: Irish Government announcement, writeups on IrishCentral and The Guardian.

Anthropic closes $30 billion funding round at a $380 billion valuation

Anthropic secures what has become a normally enormous valuation. (Picture: Anthropic)
The round is the second largest tech investment in history, and puts Anthropic close to the top of the valuation range for AI labs, having grown its revenue ten times for every year the last three years.

Their current run-rate revenue sits at $14 billion, they say, well within that range.

Continue reading “Anthropic closes $30 billion funding round at a $380 billion valuation”

Alphabet set to double AI spending as Google owner hits record revenue

AI spending increases twofold at Alphabet this year. (Picture: generated)
The Google owner is set to join Amazon and Meta in spending more than $100 billion on AI this year, as its 2025 revenue tops $400 billion.

The headline capex number of $175 to $185 billion is in comparison to a spend of $91 billion in 2025, as their cloud VP, Amin Vahdat, has said they need to double capacity every six months.

In 2026, Meta will spend $135 billion, Microsoft expects a decrease from $37 billion last quarter, and Amazon clocks in at $146 billion, according to CNBC.

Combined, Big Tech looks set to cross $500 billion in AI spending this year, Reuters reports.

As for Google’s AI push, it seems on the rise, having sold 8 million enterprise subscriptions in 2025 and now reaching 750 million monthly active users, up from 650 million last quarter.

Read more: Alphabet’s numbers, writeups at CNBC, Reuters, TechCrunch.

OpenAI’s latest numbers; 3x yearly financial/compute growth since 2023

Impressive tally; OpenAI shows unprecedented growth in their new numbers. (Picture: OpenAI)
OpenAI is scaling like never before, according to CFO Sarah Friar, who is out with some hard numbers.

Friar says revenue and compute grow in tandem with the advent of more powerful models — that they «scale with intelligence,» so to speak.

Looking at the numbers, compute has gone from 0.2 gigawatts in 2023 to 1.9 GW in 2025, growing about 3x every year since ChatGPT’s debut.

Financially, OpenAI now has $20 billion in revenue, following the same curve as the compute scale and growing about 3x per year from $2 billion in 2024.

All this is of course before ads arrive on the free tier, and before OpenAI sees any results from its global rollout of the go subscription on their revenue.

On the compute side, OpenAI is chasing infrastructure like there is no tomorrow, closing in on more than 30 GW before 2030 in what would be truly explosive growth — and we can only wonder as to how advanced frontier AI models will get by then.

Read more: OpenAI’s announcement, writeups on Reuters, .

Anthropic signs deal for $10 billion funding at a $350 billion valuation

The Claude makers value just keeps soaring. (Picture: Adobe)
Hot off the heels from discussing a $300 billion valuation, Anthropic is raising the bar in its latest funding round.

The leading financiers are Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC and Coatue Management, which are forking out $10 billion to the AI lab’s coffers.

Recently, Anthropic started testing the IPO market in what would be the strongest market debut for quite some time.

They also got a $30 billion investment from Microsoft and Nvidia in late November, and started this funding round in December.

It works out to a respectable middle ground for Anthropic, valuing the company between xAI’s recent $230 billion and OpenAI’s well documented worth of $500 billion.

Read more: Reuters and CNBC.

Disney invests $1 billion in cross-licensing deal for characters in Sora

Disney licenses beloved characters for use on Sora, and will get to use OpenAI tools in production.
While Disney is licensing to OpenAI, they are fighting other hard over others’ copyright violations. (Picture: andy orin, CC BY 2.0)
Users will be able to use Disney characters without breaking copyrights, in return for Disney getting to use the technology internally for three years.

The deal will license some 200 Disney-owned characters from the likes of Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars for use in Sora, free of charge (as in money) and charges (as in lawsuits).

The deal will also see Disney adopt ChatGPT and Sora internally, which is the other way of the license — helping Disney do everything from light sketches to development planning.

Continue reading “Disney invests $1 billion in cross-licensing deal for characters in Sora”

Big Tech doubles down on even bigger AI spend

Big tech will spend about a quarter of a trillion dollars on "capital expenditures" this year, according to quarterly reports.
Data center deals are flourishing and none of the big tech spenders feel they can afford not be in the race. (Picture: Adobe)
Quarterly results are in for Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta — and while the numbers are mixed, they all agree on big capital expenditures — needed for building data centers — for fiscal year 2025.

The coming AI wars will be fought with data centers and gigawatts, and nobody wants to lose out.

Continue reading “Big Tech doubles down on even bigger AI spend”