OpenAI just closed its biggest funding round, raising $110 billion from Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank

• OpenAI announced it secured a $110 billion funding round, its biggest yet.
• The round included investment from Amazon, Nvidia, and Softbank.
• OpenAI said it was entering a "new phase" where frontier AI was moving from research to daily use.

OpenAI just made its biggest raise yet.

The company said it has secured a $110 billion investment, with backing coming from Nvidia, Amazon, and SoftBank.

The new funding was at a $730 billion pre-money valuation, OpenAI said in a Friday announcement. The round included $30 billion from SoftBank, $50 billion from Amazon, and $30 billion from Nvidia. The company had a $500 billion valuation as of October after a secondary share sale.

OpenAI said it had also signed a strategic partnership with Amazon that would see the two companies build customized AI models for Amazon. $35 billion of Amazon's investment is tied to certain milestones being met, OpenAI added.

OpenAI said it also "secured next generation inference compute" with Nvidia.

OpenAI said it expects additional investors to join as the round progresses, it added.

"We are entering a new phase where frontier AI moves from research into daily use at global scale," OpenAI wrote in the announcement. "Leadership will be defined by who can scale infrastructure fast enough to meet demand, and turn that capacity into products people rely on."

In a separate joint statement, OpenAI and Microsoft said their relationship was not changed by the latest investment round.

Speaking on CNBC after Friday's announcement, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman downplayed concerns around circular financing between AI companies and discussed OpenAI's IPO prospects.

"We are open to going public at the right time. There are advantages to being private, there are clear advantages to being public," he said.