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The OpenAi CEO, Sam Altman, accompanied by the president of the United States, Donald Trump, the CTO of Oracle Larry Ellison (R) and the SoftBank CEO, Masayoshi Son (2nd-R), speaks during a press conference in press in The White House Roosevelt on January 21, 2025 Washington, DC.
Andrew Harnik | Getty images
SoftBank is in conversations to invest up to $ 25 billion in OpenAI, which would make it the main sponsor of the startup, CNBC confirmed.
The agreement has not yet been ended, according to a person with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be appointed because the negotiations are confidential. He FOOT He was the first to inform SoftBank’s potential investment.
In November, Operai allowed employees to sell around $ 1.5 billion in shares in a tender offer to SoftBank, people familiar with the matter. He told CNBC at that time. A source said that the founder of SoftBank, Masayoshi are, was persistent by requesting a larger participation in the startup after putting $ 500 million in the last round of financing of OpenAi.
SoftBank, OpenAi and Oracle They are associating in a Joint Business called Stargate that was revealed in the White House by President Donald Trump last week. The plan requires that billions of dollars be invested in the artificial intelligence infrastructure of the United States.
Openai, which to date has had Microsoft As your key investor, you are moving towards a profit structure. Founded in 2015 as a non -profit organization, Openai is creating a public benefit corporation to supervise commercial operations, eliminating some of its non -profit restrictions and allowing it to work more as a high growth startup. That means that it needs more capital and more computation to compete in the IA generative arms race, a market that analysts say it could reach $ 1 billion in a decade.
“The hundreds of billions of dollars that the main companies are now investing in the development of AI show what will really be needed so that Operai continues to chase the mission,” the OpenI Board wrote in a blog post last month.
Operai has been valued at an assessment of $ 157 billion for private investors. At the end of 2022, the company launched its chatbopt chatgpt 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, as well as Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Anthrope.
Meanwhile, a Chinese rival is exploiting in the United States. 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.
The Operai CEO, Sam Altman, described Depseek’s R1 model as “impressive” and wrote in x that “we will obviously deliver much better models and it is also a legitimate vigorization to have a new competitor!”
SoftBank did not immediately respond to a comment request.
LOOK: The Stargate project shows that SoftBank is in a unique position