OpenAI has completed a funding round at a $500 billion valuation, making it the world's largest privately held company.
A secondary share sale, enabling current and former staff of the artificial intelligence company to sell some of their shares, was completed in the early hours of Thursday.
While the ChatGPT developer had prepared for over $10 billion of shares to be sold, the final total was $6.6 billio, according to a person familiar with the deal, first reported by Bloomberg.
However, the record valuation was reached, a massive jump from $300 billion earlier this year.
The source argued that lower participation in the share sale was being seen internally as a vote of confidence in the company’s long-term prospects, rather than a lack of demand from investors.
This transaction makes OpenAI the world’s most valuable privately held company, surpassing Elon Musk's SpaceX, which has been recently calculated to have a valuation of around at $450 billion, though last raised money in 2024 at a valuation of $350 billion.
Last month, Nvidia Corp (NASDAQ:NVDA) agreed to progressively invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI as part of a strategic partnership by which the $4 trillion semiconductor giant will invest in the AI company as it uses its chips to expand its AI processing power.