OpenAI Closes Record $122 Billion Funding Round, Valued at $852 Billion

OpenAI closed the largest private funding round in history on March 31, 2026, raising $122 billion and setting a valuation of $852 billion — a figure that makes it the most capitalized private company in American history. The round was co-led by SoftBank and Andreessen Horowitz, with Amazon committing $50 billion (contingent partly on an IPO or AGI milestone), NVIDIA investing $30 billion, and additional participation from D.E. Shaw, MGX, TPG, and T. Rowe Price. The round grew from an initial February 2026 announcement of $110 billion, reflecting accelerating investor demand.

One historically novel aspect of the round was the inclusion of $3 billion from retail investors via bank channels — the first time individual investors have directly participated in an OpenAI capital raise. OpenAI's shares are also now held within select ARK Invest ETFs, giving retail exposure through public markets for the first time. CEO Sam Altman confirmed the company now has 900 million weekly active users and over 50 million paying subscribers, underscoring that the commercial scale justifies the valuation despite ongoing losses.

The round positions OpenAI for a near-term IPO, which analysts at Bloomberg and TechCrunch expect within 12-18 months. The massive capital raise comes as OpenAI faces accelerating competition from Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, and Chinese labs. The company has indicated it will deploy the new capital into compute infrastructure — specifically next-generation data centers for training frontier models and scaling its inference fleet to support the growing subscriber base. SoftBank's Masayoshi Son, who has described artificial general intelligence as "the most important thing humanity has ever created," is now the single largest financial backer of the company leading the race to build it.