Operai in conversations to raise up to $ 40 billion at an assessment of $ 340 billion

Operai is in conversations to raise up to $ 40 billion in a financing round that would raise the assessment of the artificial intelligence company to up to $ 340 billion, CNBC confirmed.

Softbank of Masayoshi are leading the round, contributing between $ 15 billion and 25 billion, according to two people familiar with the negotiations that asked not to be named because the conversations are ongoing. SoftBank would overcome Microsoft As the main sponsor of OpenAI.

He Wall Street Journal He was the first to inform about conversations.

Part of the financing can be used for OpenAi’s commitment to Stargate, a joint business between SoftBank, OpenAi and Oracle which was introduced by President Donald Trump Last week, the fountains said. The plan requires that billions of dollars be invested in the US infrastructure.

Operai was last valued at an assessment of $ 157 billion for private investors. At the end of 2022, the company launched its Chatbot Chatbot and began the boom of the generative AI. Opadai He closed his last round of $ 6.6 billion in Octoberpreparing to compete aggressively with Elon Musk’s XAI and Microsoft, Google, Amazon and anthropic.

Meanwhile, the Deepseek Chinese starting laboratory is exploiting in the United States, presenting a new competition to OpenAi. Deepseek saw its application soar at the top of Apple The App Store classifications this week and US markets led to reports that their powerful model was trained at a fraction of the cost of US competitors.

In an event in Washington, DC, on Thursday presented by Openai, CEO Sam Altman said Depseek is “clearly a great model.”

“This is a reminder of the level of competition and the need for the democratic LL to win,” he said. He said he also points to the “level of interest in reasoning, the level of interest in the open source.”

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