OpenAI, the world’s largest and most valuable artificial intelligence company, is talking to investors about a new $40 billion funding round, the Financial Times has reported.

According to the paper, SoftBank could be at the centre of the new funding, and is expected to invest a figure of around $15 billion to $25 billion. If successful, the new round could raise OpenAI’s market valuation to around $300 billion.

Despite having begun as a non-profit startup years ago, Open AI announced last September it was undergoing internal restructuring to become a ‘public benefit corporation’ (although it wants to keep its non-profit arm).

This will be the second major funding round in a matter of months. In October last year, the company raised $6.8 billion in a separate round, which took its market value to $157 billion.

Frontier AI research

OpenAI said at the time: “The new funding will allow us to double down on our leadership in frontier AI research, increase compute capacity, and continue building tools that help people solve hard problems.”

CEO Sam Altman has defended restructuring the company into a ‘for-profit’. He recently told The New York Times developing AI required a lot more funding than initially thought.

OpenAI and SoftBank are also at the centre of an ambitious new US AI infrastructure project dubbed Stargate. Supported by President Donald Trump, the venture is expected to spend around $500 billion on AI projects in the next four years.

DeepSeek Chaos

OpenAI’s latest attempt to attract funding from investors is bold, to say the least, given how financial markets have reacted to the arrival of DeepSeek on the AI scene.

The Chinese AI assistant and Chatbot, now considered the main rival to OpenAI’s star product ChatGPT, is said have been developed at a fraction of the amount firms and governments in the US and Europe are pouring into their AI infrastructure.

Those claims, whether true or not, led to more than $1 trillion sell-offs in market shares of AI firms in a day. Investors are now wondering whether their billions of dollars of investment in US/Europe-based AI firms makes financial sense.

OpenAI has tried to weather the DeepSeek storm, with CEO Sam Altman promising to “fast-track product release and deliver better models” than its newest Chinese competitor.

It has gone a step further, by claiming the Chinese AI startup used OpenAI’s “proprietary models to train its own open-source competitor.” But the damage had already been done.

Venture capital investor Marc Andreessen was recently quoted by the FT calling DeepSeek’s arrival on the scene “AI’s Sputnik moment,” indicating a shift in both future investment decisions as well as technology development trends.

It would be naive to give up on OpenAI already. ChatGPT is still the best AI assistant for many, and CEO Altman is simply too smart to just sit back and watch as Chinese competitors take the lead.

Investors, however, look at other factors. They want to know if their investment can return a profit in the long run. We will wait and see whether Altman can convince them.