OpenAI raises additional money to bring record funding round to $120 billion, CFO tells Cramer - CNBC
OpenAI has locked in an additional $10 billion commitment, pushing its record funding round to $120 billion. The new tranche brings fresh institutional names onto the cap table — Andreessen Horowitz, D.E. Shaw Ventures, MGX, TPG, and T. Rowe Price — and marks Microsoft joining the investment after a quiet period. Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar confirmed the expanded round in an interview with CNBC, calling it a signal of broad-based conviction in the AI thesis.
The headline number masks a more complicated capital stack. Out of approximately $155 billion in total commitments across both the February tranche and the newly announced top-up, OpenAI has received roughly $25 billion in cash so far: $15 billion from Amazon upfront and $10 billion from SoftBank as the first leg of its $30 billion commitment. The remaining capital is structured in future tranches, GPU credits, or conditional instruments — and some of it is hostage to OpenAI hitting its own milestones.
Amazon, the largest single backer at $50 billion total, has $35 billion of that commitment tied to conditions that sources describe as including an IPO by the end of 2026. SoftBank is structuring its $30 billion as three $10 billion payments on April 1, July 1, and October 1 of this year. Nvidia's $30 billion commitment is largely in the form of dedicated GPU capacity and infrastructure credits rather than cash — a meaningful distinction when evaluating how much firepower OpenAI actually has to deploy today.
Friar pushed back on skepticism that the commitments represent phantom capital. "What I'm really pleased about is we raised money all around the ecosystem," she told CNBC. "It didn't matter where you went — people really believed in this AI revolution and they wanted to put their money to work behind it."
The spending trajectory explains why the capital stack matters. OpenAI is projecting expenditures of $17 billion in 2026, escalating to $35 billion in 2027 and $45 billion in 2028, according to documents cited by multiple outlets. The company's compute spend commitments appear in two separate investor documents with different scopes and dates: as of December, OpenAI told investors it had roughly $665 billion in estimated compute spend commitments through 2030; separately, Reuters reported in February that OpenAI was targeting around $600 billion in total compute spend through 2030. The two figures come from different documents at different times and are not directly comparable — one is a disclosed commitment figure, the other is an operational target.
The additional tranche with new institutional investors appears designed, at least in part, to broaden the shareholder base ahead of a public listing. OpenAI has said it expects an IPO in the second half of 2026, though the conditional Amazon commitment creates a direct dependency: if the offering slips past the end of this year, one of the largest checks in the round could be deferred. The company plans to nearly double its workforce from 4,500 to 8,000 by the end of 2026.
OpenAI generated roughly $13.1 billion in revenue in 2025, according to CNBC, which reported the user base has grown to 900 million weekly active users. The company separately announced it will expand an existing $38 billion Amazon Web Services agreement by $100 billion over the next eight years — another indicator of how compute commitments are layered on top of equity raises.
The new investors joining the cap table represent a range of capital types. Abu Dhabi's sovereign investment fund MGX, private equity firm TPG, mutual fund T. Rowe Price, and hedge fund D.E. Shaw join venture firm Andreessen Horowitz in the tranche. Microsoft, which holds a roughly 27 percent stake in OpenAI's for-profit entity following last year's restructuring, is also participating — a signal of continued alignment between the two organizations despite the structural changes that have loosened OpenAI's exclusive dependence on Microsoft's Azure cloud.
What the $120 billion figure obscures is that most of it hasn't arrived yet. The cash-on-hand positions OpenAI to fund current operations and near-term infrastructure buildout, but the conditional tranches and GPU credit structures mean the company remains dependent on hitting execution milestones — on capability development, on revenue growth, and on getting a public offering done — to unlock the full commitment stack. The round is a show of confidence. Whether it constitutes actual capital is a separate question.