Openai, San Francisco AI that was in the field of funds for years, is holding talks with the Japanese Softbank Group for an investment of up to $ 25 billion, according to three people familiar with the negotiations.
Some of these funds can be used to cover Openai’s commitment to Stargate, the Data Center project of $ 100 billion He announced in the White House last weekPeople said. But the money will be separate from the Softbank investment that it already puts in this project.
The sources, who asked not to be identified because the talks are confidential, stressed that the discussion on the conditions of investment is still ongoing. One of the persons familiar with the negotiations said that the deal could estimate Openai near $ 250 billion, while another places the evaluation closer to 340 billion dollars. The largest number will make Openai the second most valuable private company in the world, behind Elon Musk’s Spacex directly, According to CB InsightsThat tracks startups.
Companies said that Stargate, a joint project for SoftBank, Openai and the Oracle software, could lead to $ 500 billion in computing infrastructure investment.
Negotiations were reported earlier By financial times.
Openai began an artificial intelligence boom in late 2022 with Chatbot version online, ChatGPT. But the company has an unusually loud -year -old since then.
Executive officials are still trying to repair Openai’s reputation after its board of directors was unexpectedly launched, the CEO, Sam Altman, about a year after the release of ChatGPT. Repeated after five days, but Openai has lost many prominent employees since then, Including Ilya Sutskever, chief scientist and co -founder.
In October, Openai completed a $ 6.6 billion funding deal, which is estimated at $ 157 billion, almost doubles the prominent company evaluation of only nine months. Softbank was part of that deal.
In December, Openai unveiled the new AI technology called Openai O3. But after not long, it is called Deepseek, an unknown Chinese starter company The technology industry shocked With the release of the artificial intelligence system that can match the AI products made in the United States.
The Chinese company said that it has built new artificial intelligence technology at a lower price and with fewer computer chips that are difficult to obtain from its American competitors, which challenges the belief in the industry level that the largest and best artificial intelligence will cost billions of dollars. Openai said on Wednesday that he was investigating whether it was Deepseek may have been incorrectly harvested Openai data to help build its own systems.
(New York Times prosecution Openai and its partner, Microsoft, accused of violating copyright for news content related to artificial intelligence systems. Openai and Microsoft denied these claims.)
Since Deepseek confirmed that it could build Amnesty International more, there were questions about the wisdom of investing hundreds of billions of dollars in new data centers. But many experts believe that huge amounts of computing power will continue to provide companies like Openai to a market feature.
With more chips, they can explore new ways to build artificial intelligence. In other words, more chips can still give companies a technical and competitive advantage. More chips will also be needed to run new “logic” artificial intelligence models such as Openai O3. This requires more computing power when people and companies use it.
Eren Griffiths contributed to the reports.
