OpenAI expands its record funding round to over $120 billion as it eyes a potential IPO later this year

OpenAI is expanding its record financing round by another 10 billion dollars, pushing the total past 120 billion dollars, CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC. The increase had already been flagged when the initial 110 billion dollar round was announced. This could be OpenAI's last private funding round before a potential IPO later this year.

New investors include Andreessen Horowitz, D.E. Shaw Ventures, MGX, TPG, and T. Rowe Price. Microsoft is also participating, with Friar calling the company "an incredible partner." A leaked investor document lists Microsoft as OpenAI's biggest risk factor, which made some headlines but is hardly surprising given how heavily OpenAI still relies on Microsoft for both funding and compute. The dependency runs both ways, though: OpenAI is also an enormous risk for Microsoft.

The partnership has been showing cracks, and two recent moves make that hard to ignore: Microsoft is ramping up efforts to train its own models toward "super intelligence," and it's bringing Anthropic's Cowork technology into Copilot, pulling in tech from OpenAI's biggest B2B rival, of all companies. Microsoft's reliability as a distribution partner for OpenAI models is starting to look shaky.