OpenAI completes its largest funding round ever: raising $122 billion with a valuation of $852 billion

Ask AI · How OpenAI’s Funding Could Lay the Groundwork for a Public Listing Plan?

IT Home, April 1 News: OpenAI has completed a financing round, raising $122 billion USD with a valuation of $852B USD (IT Home note: at the current exchange rate, roughly RMB 5.9 trillion). This is the company’s largest financing round to date, and external observers expect it to list on the public capital markets this year.

This round of financing will further expand OpenAI’s cash reserves. Currently, the company is spending heavily to purchase AI chips, expand data centers, and hire top talent with high salaries.

The round was co-led by SoftBank and the Anderson · Horowitz fund, D.E. Shaw Ventures, MGX, TPG, and the Ping Pong Group. Amazon, Nvidia, and Microsoft are also participating in the investment.

About $3 billion USD will be contributed by individual investors through banking channels. Multiple exchange-traded funds under Ark Investment Management will also be included in OpenAI’s target, allowing more retail investors to hold shares in this non-public company and helping broaden its shareholder base further ahead of the anticipated initial public offering.

OpenAI also announced that, supported by multiple leading global banks, its revolving credit facility has been expanded to approximately $4.7 billion USD. The company said that this credit facility has not yet been drawn down. This means that at a stage of ramping up compute power and infrastructure spending, the company’s move is intended to enhance financial flexibility rather than address a short-term liquidity shortfall.

The official announcement of OpenAI’s financing doesn’t read like a typical blog post or tweet thread; instead, it feels more like an initial draft of a prospectus. The text heavily uses analogies related to business flywheels, breaks down unit-by-unit compute power revenue data in detail, and also employs market-argument wording that institutional investors particularly favor.

OpenAI also simultaneously released the latest revenue and user data, claiming that monthly revenue has reached $2 billion USD (IT Home note: at the current exchange rate, roughly RMB 59k). It also publicly took aim at competitors, saying: “At this stage, our revenue growth rate is four times that of Google, Meta, and other internet and mobile-era giants as defined by them.”

The company also disclosed that its consumer AI business has more than 900 million weekly active users, and paid subscription users have surpassed 50 million. Over the past year, usage related to search has grown by nearly two times. Less than six weeks after the launch of OpenAI’s advertising pilot business, its annual recurring revenue has already exceeded $100 million USD. This company, which previously accumulated its user base through an ad-free model, has therefore opened up a highly promising new revenue channel.

This AI giant said that its enterprise business is also growing rapidly: the enterprise business now accounts for 40% of revenue, up significantly from about 30% last year. The company expects enterprise and consumer revenue to be on par by the end of 2026. The company said that the comprehensive growth of its agent-workflow business is driven by the latest model GPT-5.4.

Finally, OpenAI positions itself as a “super AI application,” making it clear that it is determined to build a core entry-point platform for ordinary people to use artificial intelligence.

All the information conveys a core signal: OpenAI is laying the groundwork for an IPO narrative in real time. This round of financing is not only to raise funds, but also to anchor the market’s overall expectations for its IPO.