Amazon is reportedly in talks to invest $50B in OpenAI
In Brief
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OpenAI, a company already valued at $500 billion, has made it known that it’s on the hunt for another $100 billion in investment. Such a funding round could lead the company’s valuation to shoot up to a titanic $830 billion. The Wall Street Journal is now reporting that Amazon may contribute at least $50 billion of that record-breaking investment.
Not much is known about the potential deal, although the Journal notes that Amazon’s CEO, Andy Jassy, is currently leading the negotiations with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. TechCrunch reached out to Amazon and OpenAI for comment.
In its pursuit of additional funding, OpenAI has also reportedly been having discussions with sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East, and The New York Times has written that the startup has held additional talks with Nvidia, Microsoft, and SoftBank. The funding deal is expected to close by the end of Q1.
Such a partnership between Amazon and OpenAI would be particularly interesting because of Amazon’s close ties to the OpenAI competitor Anthropic. Amazon’s AWS is the primary cloud and training provider for Anthropic, and the company has invested at least $8 billion into Anthropic. Amazon also recently opened an $11 billion data center campus in Indiana, designed to exclusively run Anthropic models.
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