OpenAI, a company alreadyvalued at $500 billion, has made it known that it’s on the hunt foranother $100 billionin investment. Such a funding round could lead the company’s valuation to shoot up to a titanic $830 billion. The Wall Street Journal is nowreportingthat Amazon may contribute at least $50 billion of that record-breaking investment.
Not much is known about the potential deal, although the Journal notes that Amazon’s CEO, Andy Jassy, is currently leading the negotiations with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. TechCrunch reached out to Amazon and OpenAI for comment.
In its pursuit of additional funding, OpenAI has also reportedly been having discussions with sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East and The New York Timeshas writtenthat the startup has held additional talks with Nvidia, Microsoft and SoftBank. The funding deal isexpected to closeby the end of Q1.
Such a partnership between Amazon and OpenAI would be particularly interesting because of Amazon’s close ties to the OpenAI competitor Anthropic. Amazon’s AWS is theprimary cloud and training providerfor Anthropic, and the company hasinvested at least $8 billion into Anthropic. Amazon also recently opened an$11 billion data center campusin Indiana, designed to exclusively run Anthropic models.
Source: Techcrunch
