According to The New York Times, OpenAI, a leader in the field of artificial intelligence, recently completed a major transaction that allowed its employees to sell their company shares. This transaction has raised OpenAI’s valuation to $86 billion, making it one of the most valuable startups globally.
The planned transaction was originally scheduled to take place last year but was delayed due to the decision by the OpenAI board to remove CEO Sam Altman in November. Shortly after, Altman was rehired by the company, and the board underwent a reorganization.
According to reports at the time, the transaction was led by the investment team at Thrive Capital and was expected to purchase up to $1 billion or more in stocks from employees or other investors. Prior to the Altman incident, a group of investors, including Sound Ventures, a company that already held OpenAI shares, was set to participate in the upcoming acquisition but was not reported.
It is worth mentioning that OpenAI completed a financing round in April last year, which also allowed employees to sell their stocks to investors. In this transaction, OpenAI raised a total of $495 million, 65% more than the previously reported $300 million. The investors valued the company at $27 billion to $29 billion, which means that the valuation has increased by 175% in less than a year.
In addition, Bloomberg reported that besides the acquisition, OpenAI is exploring the possibility of raising new funds, which could further increase the company’s valuation to over $100 billion. Meanwhile, Altman is actively seeking to raise billions of dollars to increase the supply of cutting-edge computing chips globally.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Altman has already concluded negotiations with SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, TSMC, and representatives of manufacturers such as the United Arab Emirates’ Mubadala Investment, to build more than 10 advanced process chip factories within a few years. TSMC will be fully entrusted to manage and utilize advanced process manufacturing of GPU and other semiconductor chips to address the upcoming chip shortage.
Related Reports
Beware! Hackers impersonate ChatGPT to spread “malware”, Meta: developing defense strategies
AI Needs Regulation: ChatGPT creator says artificial intelligence can manipulate US elections, calls for licensing system
Prevent ChatGPT from selling your personal data! But users have to pay a small price
Google AI chatbot “Bard” tutorial: 10 new features to compete with ChatGPT