Report: SoftBank will invest $40 billion, becoming the largest investor in OpenAI

SoftBank bets heavily on OpenAI.

On February 7th, Friday, according to CNBC, SoftBank plans to directly invest $40 billion in OpenAI at a valuation of $260 billion, higher than the previously reported maximum of $25 billion. This funding will be paid in installments over the next 12 to 24 months, with the first payment expected as early as this spring. This round of financing will make SoftBank the largest investor in OpenAI, surpassing Microsoft, which has previously provided over $13 billion in funding to OpenAI.

After the investment is completed, OpenAI's post-investment valuation will reach $300 billion, lower than the originally planned $340 billion. Notably, SoftBank also plans to allocate $10 billion of the investment quota to other partners through joint investments.

Sources revealed that part of the funding from this investment will be used for the "Stargate" project. This project is jointly established by SoftBank, OpenAI, and Oracle, aiming to invest in AI infrastructure construction in the United States. In January of this year, former President Trump announced this project.

Microsoft and OpenAI's relationship cooling?

Analysis indicates that Microsoft is no longer the sole cloud service provider for OpenAI. Due to capacity limitations of Microsoft Azure cloud services, which have not grown as expected, OpenAI has begun collaborating with companies like Oracle and Coreweave to meet its increasing demand for computing resources.

The prosperity of the AI industry largely relies on large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, which require massive amounts of data and computing power for training. Therefore, OpenAI is expanding its cloud computing partnerships while continuously raising funds to address its enormous computing needs.

The generative AI race is in full swing

Since the launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, OpenAI has maintained its lead in the generative AI field. Once ChatGPT was released, it ignited the market and spurred a global wave of AI applications. In the face of OpenAI's rapid rise, giants such as Elon Musk's xAI, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, and Anthropic have all joined the competition. Market analysts predict that the revenue of the generative AI market could exceed $1 trillion in the next decade.

As OpenAI competes for the global market, Chinese competitor DeepSeek has quickly topped the Apple App Store with its groundbreaking R1 model. Reports indicate that DeepSeek's model training costs are significantly lower than those of its American counterparts, posing a challenge to the U.S. market.

In response to this challenge, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated on social platform X: "DeepSeek's R1 model is impressive, but we will clearly launch better models. The emergence of new competitors is indeed exciting!" In January of this year, OpenAI launched an AI platform specifically for the U.S. government—ChatGPT Gov. This platform offers higher security than the ChatGPT Enterprise version, allowing government agencies to input non-public, sensitive information into the model within a dedicated secure environment. OpenAI stated that this is to further meet the government's high standards for security and privacy.

Additionally, to expand into overseas markets, SoftBank and OpenAI announced the establishment of a joint venture called "SB OpenAI Japan," focusing on promoting OpenAI's enterprise technology to Japanese companies. Meanwhile, in February of this year, SoftBank committed to investing $3 billion annually in OpenAI's technology, which will serve SoftBank and its subsidiaries, including the British chip design company Arm