Analysis
Nvidia and SoftBank are putting in a final $20 billion to close out OpenAI's current pre-IPO funding round, according to an exclusive report from The Information published Thursday. The tranche accounts for most of a round that had already been reported at $30 billion and a $1.4 trillion valuation, per Pulse's prior coverage of OpenAI's pre-IPO fundraising, with two investors who are already deeply financially entangled with OpenAI writing bigger checks rather than new names joining the syndicate.
Closing Out an Already-Massive Round
OpenAI has raised roughly $180 billion since 2015, according to Pulse's company data, through a sequence of rounds that have each outpaced the last:
“- March 2025 — SoftBank-led round: $40 billion at a $300 billion valuation.”
- October 2024 — Thrive-led round: $6.6 billion at a $157 billion valuation.
- March 2025 — SoftBank-led round: $40 billion at a $300 billion valuation.
- March 2026 — Record round (Amazon, Nvidia, SoftBank): $122 billion at an $852 billion valuation.
- 2026 (ongoing) — Pre-IPO round: reported at $30 billion and a $1.4 trillion valuation, which CEO Sam Altman has said will close before any public listing even begins -- a listing he's declined to put a date on until OpenAI can make "confident safety claims" about its models.
The $20 billion from Nvidia and SoftBank appears to make up the bulk of that $30 billion pre-IPO round, closing it out just as Altman has publicly ruled out a near-term listing.
Two Investors, One Balance Sheet
What makes this tranche notable isn't the size — OpenAI has absorbed bigger single checks before — it's who's writing it. Nvidia sells OpenAI the chips that run its models, and is now also funding the purchase of more of them. SoftBank has layered margin loans and junk bonds on top of its own OpenAI stake to keep participating in rounds like this one. Both relationships compound the same exposure: if OpenAI's valuation resets lower, Nvidia's revenue outlook and SoftBank's balance sheet take the hit together, not separately.
OpenAI's most direct competitor for this kind of capital is Anthropic, which Nvidia has also backed with a roughly $10 billion stake and which has reportedly prepared its own confidential IPO prospectus. Google's DeepMind, by contrast, draws on Alphabet's existing balance sheet rather than running separate funding rounds, and xAI folded into SpaceX's roughly $1.25 trillion combined entity earlier this year rather than raising as a standalone AI lab. OpenAI is increasingly the only major lab still running Series-style mega-rounds at this scale.
The Numbers Against the Run Rate
OpenAI's run rate has held at roughly $25 billion annualized since February, per Pulse's company tracking — flat even as the company has kept raising and kept spending. A $1.4 trillion valuation against that run rate works out to roughly 56 times revenue, a multiple that only makes sense if growth reaccelerates sharply or if investors are pricing in something other than current revenue, like the value of the model weights and compute contracts themselves. For comparison, SpaceX's IPO earlier this year priced the company at roughly $1.77 trillion — about 26% higher than OpenAI's own reported $1.4 trillion mark — on a business with actual delivered revenue from launches, Starlink subscriptions and its newly combined xAI unit.
What It Means for Founders and LPs
For founders raising outside the frontier-lab tier, this round is a reminder of how lopsided AI capital allocation has become: $20 billion going to close out one company's existing round is more than most sector-focused venture funds raise in a decade. LPs underwriting AI-infrastructure funds should note that Nvidia and SoftBank are effectively pre-funding their own future exits — Nvidia's chip sales and SoftBank's Arm and data center bets both get easier to justify if OpenAI keeps raising at ever-higher valuations. That's a reasonable bet as long as OpenAI's revenue eventually catches up to its valuation; it's a much worse one if it doesn't.
What the headline number misses: this is still primary capital from private investors, not proof of revenue growth or profitability, and it arrives the same week Axios reported that the White House and the AI industry are moving closer together on policy even as safety scrutiny intensifies elsewhere in the sector. A $20 billion check closes a funding round; it doesn't resolve the flat run rate, Altman's own refusal to set an IPO date, or the structural question of how much of OpenAI's reported $1.4 trillion valuation rests on compute commitments rather than cash the company has actually collected.
Whether Microsoft or Amazon participate in whatever OpenAI raises next will say more about the syndicate's breadth than this tranche alone. A round closed out by just two investors, while the rest of OpenAI's existing backer base sits out, is a narrower signal than the headline figure suggests.
