122 Billion Dollars! The Highest Single Private Placement Financing in Business History is Created

This morning.OpenAIannounced the completion of its latest round offinancingThe funds raised amounted to$122 billion(approximately RMB 8416.78 billion), with a post-investment valuation of$852 billion(approximately RMB 5,877,948 million), becoming theThe largest single private equity financing ever raised globally.

▲OpenAI announces new funding (Source: Social Media X)

OpenAI's latest valuation has been comparable to the total market value of “Tencent + Ali”. As of yesterday's close, Ali's Hong Kong stock market capitalization of 2.27 trillion Hong Kong dollars, Tencent's Hong Kong stock market capitalization of 4.42 trillion Hong Kong dollars, a total of 6.69 trillion Hong Kong dollars (about 5.88 trillion yuan).

The financing announced this morning was provided byAmazon, Nvidia and SoftbankAs a heavyweight investor and long-term partnerMicrosoft corporationcontinues to be involved as well. SoftBank, along with a16z, D. E. Shaw Ventures, MGX, TPG, and T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc.co-leadThis round of financing.

Since its inception in 2015, OpenAI has accumulated approximately12 rounds of financing, with financing totaling about $168 billion (about Rs. 1,159.032 billion). Last month, OpenAI initially announced $110 billion in financing, of which亚Amazon Invests $50 Billion, NVIDIA $30 Billion, Softbank $30 Billionwhich was added to about $122 billion today.

According to the official OpenAI data, ChatGPT's monthly live time at the end of January 2023, two months after its release, exceeded100 millionWhen the next weekly activity has been about to breakOne billion.Within a year of ChatGPT's launch, its revenue reached $1 billion (roughly Rs. 6.899 billion). By the end of 2024, its quarterly revenue reachedOne billion dollars..

Previously in early March, according to the foreign media The Information, citing people familiar with the matter, as of the end of February, OpenAI's annualized revenue had exceeded$25 billion(roughly Rs. 172.4 billion), a figure that represents a 17% increase from the company's $21.4 billion in annualized revenue at the end of last year.

According to The Information, OpenAI recently raised its revenue projections for the next five years, with plans to achieve up toUS$284 billion (about RMB 1.96 trillion)of revenue.

Foreign media predicts that OpenAI will consume tens of billions of dollars over the next few years due to the need to invest more money in renting cloud servers and chips to develop the technology, and a surge in revenue could push them toIPO as early as this year.

This financing represents a further expansion of OpenAI's commercial scale and will provide ample “ammunition” for its plans to build AI super applications.

I. Monthly revenue has reached $2 billion and annualized revenue exceeds $25 billion

OpenAI's official announcement said that its monthly revenue has reached $2 billion (roughly Rs. 13.798 billion). At this stage, its revenue is growing four times faster than internet giants like Google and Meta.

ChatGPT contributes the majority of OpenAI's revenue, but the company expects more and more of its future revenue to come from enterprise customers as well as new products like advertising.

Previously, according to foreign media The Information, citing sources familiar with the matter, OpenAI calculates annualized revenue by multiplying the revenue of the past four weeks by 12, and the annualized revenue of 2026 has exceeded $25 billion (about RMB 172.4 billion). If OpenAI calculates the indicator based only on the last week's revenue peak, then OpenAI's annualized revenue is about $30 billion (about RMB 206.8 billion).

OpenAI's revenues are still higher than rival Anthropic's, but the gap between the two is narrowing: Anthropic's annualized revenues recently topped $19 billion (roughly Rs. 131 billion).

▲OpenAI and Anthropic performance trends (Source: The Information)

According to The Information, OpenAI recently raised its revenue projections for the next five years - it plans to achieve as much as $284 billion (roughly Rs. 1.96 trillion) in revenue by 2030 - but also raised its cash consumption projections, expecting that by the end of this decade, its server-related costs to reach $665 billion (roughly Rs. 4.59 trillion).

Second, ChatGPT users approaching 1 billion, Codex weekly activity growth of 5 times, will layout AI super applications

Take a closer look at OpenAI's business distribution landscape.

OpenAI has just recently launched its most powerful GPT-5.4 model to date and extended Codex to become a flagship encoding Agent with significant improvements in memory, search, personalization, and multimodal interaction.

According to OpenAI's official announcement, some of the milestones it has achieved on the application side of the product are as follows: ChatGPT has more than 900 million weekly active users and more than 50 million subscribers in the consumer AI space.ChatGPT has six times the number of monthly web visits and mobile sessions of the second-ranked AI application, and four times the total number of hours spent on AI by its users, and four times the total number of hours spent on all other AI applications combined. and even more so, 4 times more than all other AI apps combined. Search usage nearly tripled in one year, and its advertising pilot program achieved more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in less than six weeks.

Just last week, OpenAI announced the shutdown of theAI Video Generation ToolSora, a phenomenal product, was recognized by executives as a “side mission” to focus the company's resources in a more commercially viable direction.

OpenAI is reportedly focusing on building AI super-apps that will integrate ChatGPT, Codex, browsing capabilities, and its broader intelligent body capabilities to create an Agent-first user experience.

Take a look at the enterprise business, which now accounts for more than 40% of OpenAI's total revenue and is on track to equal the consumer business by the end of 2026.Driven by GPT-5.4, its API can now process more than 15 billion word elements (tokens) per minute.Codex has more than 2 million weekly active users, which is a five-fold increase over the past three months, with a month-over-month growth rate of over 70%.

In March, OpenAI just signed a big deal with Anthropic after the latter's partnership with the US Pentagon fell apart.

On the computing side, it has expanded its infrastructure strategy beyond a handful of core suppliers such as NVIDIA to include cloud services through Microsoft, Oracle, AWS, CoreWeave and Google Cloud; silicon chips through NVIDIA, AMD, AWS Trainium, Cerebras and chips it has developed in partnership with Broadcom; and data center services through partnerships with Oracle, SBE and SoftBank data center services through partnerships with Oracle, SBE and Softbank.

Third, NVIDIA participation in the lead investment, OpenAI also joined a number of ETFs

This round of financing was provided byAmazon, Nvidia and SoftbankAs a heavyweight investor and long-term partnerMicrosoft corporationalso continues to participate. SoftBank led the round along with a16z, D. E. Shaw Ventures, MGX, TPG, and an affiliate of T. Rowe Price Associates.

A number of top global investment institutions also participated in this round, including Altimeter, Appaloosa Capital, Ark Capital, BlackRock, BlackRock, Coatue, D1 Capital Partners, Dragoneer, Fidelity Investments, Goanna Capital, Insight Partners, The Paragon Group, Sands Capital, Sequoia Capital, Sound Ventures, Temasek, Thrive Capital, the University of California Investment Office, and Winslow Capital's affiliated funds.

For the first time, OpenAI has opened up its participation channels to investors through banking channels, raising more than $3 billion from individual investors. The company also announced that it will be included in a number of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) managed by ARK Invest, giving more people the opportunity to participate in the investment.

In addition, OpenAI has expanded its existing revolving credit facility to approximately $4.7 billion. The credit facility is backed by a global syndicate of banks including JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Mizuho, Royal Bank of Canada, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, UBS, HSBC and Banco Santander. As of the closing of the transaction, the credit facility had not been utilized.

Conclusion: the AI race is accelerating into the commercialization and scaling stage

The AI race is accelerating into the commercialization scale stage. The heavy injection of industry giants such as Amazon and Nvidia into the field has provided OpenAI with strong support for computing power and cloud resources, and has emphasized the depth of bundling and strategic betting by top technology companies in the field of AI infrastructure.

The valuation of up to $852 billion has raised the threshold of entry into the industry to an unprecedented height. At the same time, the hundreds of billions of dollars of financing and aggressive forecasts of revenue have revealed the current core contradiction in the AI industry: the race between huge capital investment and commercialization of cash.

OpenAI's focusing of resources on AI super-applications suggests that the industry is moving away from multiplicity to convergence in pursuit of core products that generate sustained cash flow. Whether or not it can deliver on its revenue targets as expected while consuming tens of billions of dollars over the next few years will be a key gauge of whether this round of AI mania can be sustained.