Sam Altman, founder-CEO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, on April 1 announced that the platform saw a record 1 million users in an hour — all thanks to its Ghibli-style image generation feature. Now, thanks to the user engagement, the artificial intelligence (AI) tech company has said that it has secured $40 billion from investors, in a funding round led by Softbank Group, to double valuation to $300 billion, according to a Bloomberg report.
“Hundreds of millions people use ChatGPT each week. This investment helps us push the frontier and make AI more useful in everyday life,” Sam Altman said in a statement on March 31.
The report cited Pitchbook, to say that this is the largest such financing round of all-time and almost doubles OpenAI’s valuation from $157 billion since its October 2024 fundraise, to $300 billion this year.
Who is Investing in OpenAI? What’s the Timeline? Details here
According to Bloomberg, which cited an insider, Masayoshi Son’s Softbank is leading the capital round with an initial investment of $7.5 billion and $2.5 billion from an investor syndicate.
The source, who wished to remain anonymous, said that Microsoft Corporation, Coatue Management, Altimeter Capital Management, and Thrive Capital are among the other investors in the investment group.
Notably, the same source stated that by the end of 2025, a second tranche of $30 billion will be invested in OpenAI, consisting of $7.5 billion from a syndicate and $22.5 billion from SoftBank.
OpenAI Sees Popularity Boost Thanks to Ghibli Style Images Rollout
On March 26, OpenAI made its native picture generating functionality available to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Team users globally. On April 1, it made it available to free users as well. Millions of people were astonished by this feature’s capacity to turn any photo into artwork in the Studio Ghibli style.
According to Sam Altman, OpenAI had to impose limitations on image generation for both free and paid users because of the feature’s high demand, which was “melting its GPUs (graphics processing units).”
Seeing how much people enjoy photographs in ChatGPT is a lot of pleasure. Our GPUs, however, are melting. While we try to make it more efficient, we will temporarily implement some rate constraints. I hope it will not be lengthy. On X, he said.
