OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is meeting with investors in the Middle East to meet top investors for raising a new funding round that could total at least $50 billion, according to a report from Bloomberg. Altman is said to have spoken with investors, including leading state-backed funds in Abu Dhabi.
The ChatGPT maker is said to be looking to raise $50 billion or more at a valuation of $750 billion to $830 billion. The report noted that talks are early and the amounts could change. The company had also recently held talks with Amazon to raise $10 billion.
Meanwhile, another report by CNBC noted that Altman is in the United Arab Emirates to participate in the investment talks and the round could close in the first quarter of the year.
An earlier report by The Information had stated that OpenAI was looking to raise tens of billions of dollars at a $750 billion valuation.
The company has earlier raised funding from Abu Dhabi-based tech investment firm MGX and partnered with G42 to develop a massive data center in the UAE.
OpenAI’s competitors like Anthropic and Elon Musk-led xAI have also previously raised funding from investors in the Middle East in order to meet the growing capital requirements in the field of AI.
The San Francisco-based AI startup has committed to spending $1.4 trillion on AI infrastructure in the coming years, an amount that it doesn’t currently possess. OpenAI is not currently profitable and has been losing billions of dollars annually even as it faces tough competition from the likes of Google’s Gemini, Anthropic and xAI.
OpenAI’s earlier funding round:
OpenAI had closed a $40 billion funding round led by SoftBank last year, which valued the company at $300 billion. The round marked the largest-ever private tech funding on record and also saw participation from Microsoft, Blackstone, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital, and Fidelity.
A few months later, the company finalized a $6.6 billion secondary share sale that allowed selling stocks to a group of global investors and valued the company at $500 billion.
Meanwhile, Anthropic, the company set up by former OpenAI employees, is also looking to raise funds at a valuation of $350 billion, as per Bloomberg.
With rising competition in the AI space and the steep costs attached to building cutting-edge AI models and running them, AI companies are often on the lookout for investments to build core infrastructure and ensure they have an edge against their rivals.
While OpenAI has continued to remain the number one player in the consumer AI segment since its launch in late 2022, the company has started losing ground to rivals, primarily Google’s Gemini, as per the latest SimilarWeb data.
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