OpenAI raises capital at $100 billion valuation, second only to Elon Musk's company

If the funding round goes through as planned, ChatGPT’s owner will become the second-most valuable startup in the US, behind SpaceX, owned by billionaire Elon Musk, according to data from CB Insights. Bloomberg previously reported that the San Francisco, California-based company would allow employees to sell shares at a valuation of $86 billion as early as January 2024.

f46b9cff dcda 4c92 81e4 1e40b2b02a6d 34f54c2a.jpeg — OpenAI's soaring valuation reflects the AI craze that ChatGPT created a year ago, turning the company into the hottest startup in Silicon Valley, with Microsoft investing $13 billion.

The tech world is pouring money into AI startups. Amazon.com and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, invested billions in OpenAI rival Anthropic. Salesforce invested $4.5 billion in Hugging Face, and Nvidia Corp., the world’s largest semiconductor company by market capitalization, disclosed more than two dozen investments in 2023.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is seeking funding for a chip project codenamed Tigris that aims to compete directly with Nvidia.

In October, the UAE’s G42 investment fund announced a partnership with OpenAI “to provide cutting-edge AI solutions to the UAE and regional markets,” without providing financial details. G42 was founded in 2018 and is led by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, national security adviser to the United Arab Emirates and chairman of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. OpenAI is in talks to raise between $8 billion and $10 billion from G42, according to an unnamed source.

Last month, the company that owns ChatGPT faced a leadership crisis when Altman was abruptly ousted from the board. At the time, some investors considered pulling out of the company altogether. But after just five days of turmoil, Altman was reinstated along with a new board of directors.

ByteDance denies using OpenAI technology to develop competing products

ByteDance said its use of OpenAI's technology to support the development of its own artificial intelligence (AI) models complies with the US company's terms of service.