The world leader in generative AI has completed its latest fundraising round with a record $122 billion, paving the way for a highly anticipated IPO.

OpenAI announced on Tuesday that it had raised its valuation to $852 billion, closing its latest funding round with a record $122 billion, paving the way for a highly anticipated IPO, but at a date yet to be determined.

The world leader in generative AI, parent company of ChatGPT, has finally closed its latest round of financing beyond the initial $110 billion announced at the end of February, thanks in particular to a new development: the opening of its capital to individual investors via banking channels, thus raising more than $3 billion in this operation which illustrates its methodical preparation for a possible stock market listing.

The funding round remains anchored around the three strategic investors announced on February 27: Amazon ($50 billion), Nvidia, and SoftBank ($30 billion each). Amazon's commitment, however, remains conditional on an IPO of OpenAI or the achievement of artificial general intelligence (AGI), the stage at which AI would equal all human intellectual capabilities, which has become the holy grail sought by Silicon Valley.

$2 billion in monthly revenue

The San Francisco-based company took the opportunity to confirm its plan to merge its generative AI model, ChatGPT, and its 900 million weekly users with its Codex coding tool and web browsing features into a single agentic "super-application." This strategy aims to win the battle for control of the universal entry point for users' everyday use of AI.

Pressed to demonstrate its progress toward profitability, OpenAI announced it now generates $2 billion in monthly revenue, after reaching $13.1 billion in annual revenue by 2025. Despite this meteoric revenue growth, its costs—primarily related to the construction and operation of giant data centers—are skyrocketing even faster. Meanwhile, its rival and neighbor in San Francisco, Anthropic, is benefiting from its widespread popularity among specialists thanks to the performance of its tools powered by its Claude model.

To try to reduce losses, CEO Sam Altman announced a major reorganization on March 24th to focus the company's resources and costly computing power on competing in the professional applications of AI. This reorganization of OpenAI has, for example, led to the closure of Sora, its AI-generated video social network, and the abandonment of an erotic chatbot project. To demonstrate its progress, OpenAI revealed on Tuesday that Codex, its agentic coding tool, now has over two million weekly users, five times more than in one quarter.