OpenAI in talks to raise £32bn in new funding round – reports OpenAI is in early talks to raise up to 40 billion dollars (£32 billion) in a new funding round, valuing the company at more than 300 billion dollars (£242 billion), it has been reported.
Despite this, the proposed new funding round for the ChatGPT maker would be a substantial rise in OpenAI’s valuation, which was around 150 billion dollars (£121 billion) following a 6.6 billion dollar (£5.3 billion) funding round in October.
According to reports, some of the money invested by SoftBank may be used to help pay for OpenAI’s commitment to Stargate – a US government-backed joint venture between OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle to invest up to 500 billion dollars in AI projects and infrastructure to help keep the US ahead of China in the global AI race.
News of the potential funding comes in the wake of the sudden emergence of Chinese start-up DeepSeek, which has launched an AI model that appears capable of competing with major US rivals such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT but for a fraction of the cost, challenging previous expectations of what it can cost to develop and launch industry leading AI products.
OpenAI has argued DeepSeek copied the ChatGPT maker’s work to build its AI models by using a technique called distillation, where a new, smaller AI system learns from a larger, more powerful and established one in order to train itself.
