From 100 billion dollars to 150 billion dollars, OpenAI's valuation level “slowly” rose in less than two weeks.

Following the announcement at the end of August that it was seeking new financing to become a 100 billion unicorn, OpenAI welcomed explosive news — the new round of financing may be valued at as high as 150 billion dollars.

This is nearly double the $86 billion valuation in the bid at the beginning of the year, and is also expected to be one of the highest financings for generative AI and even the entire technology sector.

The financing battle is huge

According to Bloomberg, OpenAI is being valued at 150 billion dollars, is negotiating 6.5 billion dollar financing, and plans to raise 5 billion dollar debt financing through revolving credit.

This round of financing will be led by Thrive Capital. Microsoft, the largest investor in OpenAI, will participate, and giants such as Apple and Nvidia have also been negotiating investments.

If negotiations progress, the three technology companies with the highest market capitalization in the world will all become investors in OpenAI.

Looking back, Microsoft has always been the biggest financier behind OpenAI. At the beginning of last year, Microsoft invested 10 billion dollars in OpenAI, with a total investment of 13 billion dollars, which also gave it 49% of OpenAI's profit share.

Nvidia, on the other hand, has been working closely with OpenAI for a long time. According to previous media reports, Nvidia intends to invest 0.1 billion dollars in OpenAI's new round of financing.

Apple, which is developing AI this year, is also teaming up with OpenAI to introduce ChatGPT on the latest iPhone 16 series products released in September.

However, at present, it is unclear how much Apple and Microsoft will invest in OpenAI in this round, and OpenAI has not commented on the financing negotiations.

People familiar with the matter revealed that discussions are still ongoing and the terms may change.

Earlier, OpenAI chief financial officer Sarah Friar revealed that OpenAI will use this financing to obtain more computing power and fund other operating expenses.

Solve the funding shortage problem?

Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, OpenAI has expanded rapidly beyond our ears.

From January of last year to this year, OpenAI's valuation grew from 29 billion dollars to 86 billion dollars, to 150 billion dollars now.

The speed of this explosion can be described as an explosion.

However, it should be noted that the speed at which OpenAI makes money seems to be far less than the speed at which it is spent.

At the beginning of this year, the company's annual revenue had already exceeded 3.4 billion US dollars, but OpenAI was still losing money because AI was too expensive and competition from increasingly fierce rivals.

According to “The Information,” OpenAI's loss will be close to 5 billion dollars by the end of the year.

Furthermore, the company has already spent $8.5 billion on AI training and staffing, far exceeding competitors' expenses, and its cash flow is likely to run out within the next year.

And this huge financing will also solve the problem of OpenAI's shortage of capital.

Recently, OpenAI is preparing to launch the “New King Bang,” and it is speeding up the development of the “Strawberry” and “Orion” models.

Among them, the Strawberry Big Model may be released in the next two weeks. Its launch may inject new vitality into the ChatGPT camp, and may also bring more revenue opportunities to OpenAI.

According to reports, the model has exploded in terms of mathematical and coding abilities. It claims to be “smarter, slower, and more expensive,” and is priced at 200 US dollars per month.

Also, according to previous reports, the “Strawberry” plan aims to raise more capital, and OpenAI needs this money to support the development of the next generation cutting-edge model codenamed “Orion.”

However, the smarter the AI model, the more it requires huge inference costs to train.

This also means that OpenAI needs more capital to push ahead with product updates to maintain its leading position in this wave of artificial intelligence.