OPENAI, the San Francisco Artificial Intelligence Company which was on a one -year money collection frenzy, is in talks with the Japanese conglomerate Softbank for an investment up to $ 25 billion, according to three families with negotiations .
Part of this money could be used to cover Openai’s commitment to Stargate, the $ 100 billion database project announced in the White House last week, people said. But the money would be separated from the investment that Softbank already sets up in this project.
The sources, which requested anonymity because the talks were confidential, stressed that the terms of the investment are not yet final.
Stargate, a joint venture of Softbank, Openai and the Oracle software company, could lead to $ 500 billion in IT infrastructure, companies said.
Negotiations were reported earlier by the Financial Times.
OPENAI started the BOOM of AI at the end of 2022 with the release of its online chatbot, Chatgpt. But the company has had a few unusually tumultuous years since then.
The leaders are still trying to repair OpenAi’s reputation after its board of directors unexpected its general manager, Sam Altman, about a year after the release of Chatgpt. He was reinstated five days later, but Openai lost several eminent employees since then, including Heya Sutskever, his chief scientist and co-founder.
In October, Openai concluded a fund collection agreement of $ 6.6 billion which estimated the company at $ 157 billion, doubled the valuation of the large -scale company nine months earlier. Softbank was part of this agreement.
In December, Openai unveiled a new IA technology called Openai O3. But shortly after, a little-known Chinese start-up called Deepseek shocked the technological industry with the release of an AI system that could correspond to the main AI products manufactured in the United States.
The Chinese company said that it has built its new AI technology at a lower price and with fewer computer chips that are difficult to obtain than its American competitors, which gives an industry’s belief than the larger AI And better would cost several billion dollars. Openai said on Wednesday that he was investigating to find out if Deepseek may have harvested Openai data to help build his own systems.
(The New York Times continued Openai and its partner, Microsoft, accusing them of copyright violation of news content linked to AI systems. Openai and Microsoft denied these claims.)
Since Deepseek said he could build more affordable AI, there have been questions about the wisdom of investing hundreds of billions of dollars in new data centers. But many experts believe that massive amounts of computer power will continue to provide companies like OpenAi with an advantage on the market.
With more chips, they can explore new ways to build artificial intelligence. In other words, more chips can always give companies a technical and competitive advantage. More chips will also be necessary to exploit the new models of “reasoning” AI like Openai O3. These require more computing power when people and businesses use them.
Erin Griffith contributed the reports.
