MW OpenAI's now worth more than Chevron after $300 billion valuation

By Steve Goldstein

The company at the heart of the artificial-intelligence revolution, OpenAI, just raised money at a $300 billion valuation, as the publicly traded AI stocks advanced on Tuesday.

OpenAI in a blog post said it raised $40 billion from Japan's SoftBank that values the ChatGPT maker at $300 billion. It comes as the company is unveiling new and more powerful models.

"Today we're announcing new funding-$40 billion at a $300 billion post-money valuation, which enables us to push the frontiers of AI research even further, scale our compute infrastructure, and deliver increasingly powerful tools for the 500 million people who use ChatGPT every week," the company said in a blog post.

The valuation puts OpenAI ahead of oil giant Chevron $(CVX)$, which has a market cap of $293 billion.

Last year, OpenAI estimated it will lose about $5 billion on revenue of $3.7 billion, according to New York Times and CNBC reports.

Chevron earned $18 billion on revenue of $203 billion.

SoftBank (JP:9984) has already invested $2.2 billion in OpenAI, in which Microsoft $(MSFT)$ has a minority stake.

SoftBank meanwhile said it plans to syndicate out $10 billion of the investment to co-investors. The first $10 billion investment is planned for mid-April with the rest coming in December, SoftBank said. It's going to borrow from banks including Mizuho (JP:8411) to finance the initial disbursement.

SoftBank said OpenAI is the partner closest to achieving artificial general intelligence. SoftBank is the lead investor in the Stargate project announced alongside President Donald Trump that aims to build dedicated AI infrastructure.

OpenAI is not the only AI company with a big valuation.

Last week, Elon Musk merged two of his companies, X and xAI, in a deal that valued the AI company at $80 billion. Anthropic, the maker of the Claude large language model, raised money at a $61.5 billion valuation.

Right now AI demand has been hugely profitable for Nvidia, the maker of the chips that power AI models, but not many other companies.

Nvidia shares $(NVDA)$ rose 1% in premarket trade.

CoreWeave $(CRWV)$, the AI cloud service which cut its valuation ahead of its IPO, rose 2%. Super Micro Computer $(SMCI)$ shares added 1%.

-Steve Goldstein

This content was created by MarketWatch, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. MarketWatch is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 01, 2025 05:11 ET (09:11 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.