Openi, the artificial intelligence company of San Francisco which has been in a frenzy of money collection, is in negotiations with the Japanese softbank conglomerate for an investment of up to $ 25 billion, according to three people who are familiar with the negotiations.
Some of this money could be used to cover Openai’s commitment for Stargate, the Data Center Data Center from $ 100 billion announced at the White House last week, said people. But the money would be separated from the SoftBank investment is already putting in that project.
The sources, which required anonymity because the interviews were confidential, underlined that the discussion on the terms of the investment is still in progress. A person who is familiar with the negotiations said that the agreement could enhance Openii near $ 250 billion, while another has put the evaluation closest to $ 340 billion. The largest figure would make Openi the second most precious private company in the world, right behind Spacex by Elon Musk, according to CB Insights, which keeps track of the start-ups.
Stargate, a joint venture of Softbank, Openi and the Oracle software company, could involve $ 500 billion in investments in the IT infrastructure, have affirmed the companies.
The negotiations were previously reported by the Financial Times.
Openii began the boom at the end of 2022 with the release of his online chatbot, chatgpt. But the company has had a few unusually tumultuous years.
The managers are still trying to repair Openi’s reputation after his Board of Directors unexpectedly fired his CEO, Sam Altman, about a year after the publication of Chatgpt. He has been restored five days later, but Openii has lost several prominent employees since then, including Ilya Sutskever, his chief scientist and a co-founder.
In October, Openii completed a fundraising agreement of $ 6.6 billion which assessed the company at $ 157 billion, almost doubled the evaluation of the high -profile company only nine months earlier. SoftBank was part of that agreement.
In December, Open presented a new technology to the Openai O3 calls. But not long after, a little-known Chinese start-up called Deepseek shocked the technological industry with the release of an artificial intelligence system that could combine the main artificial intelligence products made in the United States.
The Chinese company said she had built its new technology AI at a lower price and with fewer IT chips that are difficult to hit than its American competitors, challenging a conviction at the level of industry that the largest and best IC would cost many billion of dollars. Openi declared on Wednesday that he was investigating whether Deepseek could have improperly collected Openi’s data to help build his own systems.
(The New York Times sued Openi and its partner, Microsoft, accusing them of violation of the copyright of news related to artificial intelligence systems. Openai and Microsoft have denied these statements.)
Since Deepseek said that it could build the IA in a cheaper way, there have been questions about the wisdom of investing hundreds of billions of dollars in new data centers. But many experts believe that enormous quantities of IT power will continue to provide companies such as the market for Obs for Obs.
With multiple chips, they can explore new ways of building artificial intelligence. In other words, more chips can still offer companies a technical and competitive advantage. Chips will also be needed to manage the new models of “reasoning” such as Openii O3. These require more calculation power when people and companies use them.
Erin Griffith has contributed to relationships.