By CIO Insider Team
 

SoftBank is in discussions to inject up to an extra $30 billion into OpenAI, according to reports, as the Japanese conglomerate strengthens its commitment to the ChatGPT parent company.

The fresh investment would form part of a funding round that could raise up to $100 billion (HK$780 billion) for OpenAI, valuing it at about $830 billion.

Seeking to improve SoftBank’s position in the artificial intelligence race, Chief Executive Masayoshi Son has made an “all-in” bet on OpenAI. Earlier, SoftBank said it had completed a $41 billion investment in OpenAI, giving it an 11 percent stake.

OpenAI is observed to be grappling with rising costs to train and run its AI models as competition from Alphabet’s Google ratchets up.

Reports indicated that last month that Son had scrambled to marshal the funds for the previous investment, slowing most other dealmaking at SoftBank’s Vision Fund to a crawl.

Both OpenAI and SoftBank are also investors in Stargate, a $500 billion initiative to build AI data centers for training and inference that executives say is crucial to the US government’s ambitions to keep ahead of China in AI.

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SoftBank’s move to further strengthen its partnership with OpenAI underscores its ambition to lead the AI space and diversify its investment portfolio. With the $30 billion addition, SoftBank is betting on the continued dominance of AI technologies and OpenAI’s ability to stay at the forefront of innovations in machine learning and natural language processing.

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The fresh funding comes at a time when the artificial intelligence landscape is becoming increasingly competitive, with tech giants like Google and Microsoft also investing heavily in their own AI initiatives.