Shares to be sold
ChatGPT developer worth more than $80 billion
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The company OpenAI is continuing its success with its premium product ChatGPT. Now the company wants to sell shares. The employees can also benefit.
Microsoft-backed company OpenAI has closed a deal and, according to insiders, is now valued at $80 billion or more. This was reported by the New York Times, citing three people familiar with the deal. OpenAI is now one of the most valuable tech startups in the world, behind Chinese company ByteDance and Elon Musk's US-based space and telecommunications company SpaceX.
According to the report, the San Francisco-based company will sell existing shares in a so-called tender offer led by venture firm Thrive Capital. The deal also includes allowing employees to cash out their company shares, according to the report. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
It was already announced last year that the AI developer was aiming for a valuation of 80 to 90 billion dollars. In September 2023, according to a media report, the ChatGPT operator spoke to investors about a possible share sale.
OpenAI wants to transform the semiconductor industry
It was recently revealed that OpenAI boss Sam Altman apparently wants to reshape the global semiconductor industry. According to insiders, he is in talks with investors, including the government of the United Arab Emirates, to raise funds for an extremely ambitious technology initiative. The money will be used to increase global chip manufacturing capacity and expand the ability to use AI. The cost of the project is estimated at several trillion dollars – specifically, between five trillion and seven trillion dollars could be needed, said one of the informants.
The money will be used to enable OpenAI's growth and address the shortage of expensive AI chips. Altman has often complained that there are not enough such chips – known as graphics processing units (GPUs) – to support OpenAI's pursuit of artificial intelligence.
A few weeks after the so-called chatbot was introduced in November 2022, 100 million users were already experimenting with the software. At the same time, the topic of artificial intelligence was increasingly making headlines. Companies hope to make lucrative business out of such programs, which simulate human interactions or create complete texts based on a few keywords.
