OpenAI has reportedly secured another $8.3 billion in funding, for a valuation of $300 billion. The new investment is a major coup for the firm, coming months ahead of schedule in its plan to secure $40 billion in funding by the end of the year. The company previously secured a $30 billion commitment from SoftBank if certain goals are achieved by the start of 2026. The funding news comes as ChatGPT is close to reaching 700 million weekly active users, including a significant jump in new users over the last several months. The company has also experienced an increase in paying subscribers as more enterprises and educators turn to AI.

Participants in the latest round of funding include private equity giants Blackstone and TPG, along with mutual fund manager T. Rowe Price. Altimeter, Andreessen Horowitz, Fidelity Management, Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global and Thrive are also in the mix.

In March, when SoftBank came onboard, OpenAI raised another $2.5 billion from venture capital firms “with plans to raise an additional $7.5 billion by the end of the year. Instead, the fundraising came much sooner — and over target,” writes The New York Times.

NYT says Blackstone and TPG are particular coups, as they aren’t typical AI investors but were pursued by OpenAI as valuable “since they can promote the adoption of ChatGPT among their portfolio companies, including those in healthcare, financial services and industrials.”

On Monday, OpenAI Chief Product Officer Nick Turley posted on X that “this week, ChatGPT is on track to reach 700M weekly active users — up from 500M at the end of March and 4x since last year.”

CNBC reports that “OpenAI now counts five million paying business users, up from three million in June, as enterprises and educators embrace artificial intelligence tools.” The commercial momentum is especially good news for OpenAI, which must fully transition to a for-profit entity by December 31 in order to receive the full-funding pledged by SoftBank.

The company elected to do so by adopting a public benefit corporation (PBC) structure, which balances profit interests with the public good. “The nonprofit parent would continue to control the PBC and become a big shareholder in it,” Reuters wrote in May, when OpenAI revised its PBC plans from an earlier model that would have put the profit wing in charge of assets.

The Wall Street Journal recently threw cold water on OpenAI’s profitability goals in a July article characterizing its costly and ambitious Stargate project as “struggling,” describing its launch as “lethargic” and reporting the company had “sharply scaled back its near-term plans.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman punched back the next day, posting on X that “we are planning to significantly expand the ambitions of Stargate past the $500 billion commitment we announced in January” for the U.S. market along with an in-progress photo of a sprawling data center under construction and citing a July deal with Oracle for “an additional 4.5 gigawatts of capacity.”

Related:
For the First Time, OpenAI Models Are Available on AWS, TechCrunch, 8/5/25
OpenAI Releases Open-Weight Reasoning Models Optimized for Running on Laptops, Reuters, 8/5/25