OpenAI announces another $110 billion in investment funding including $30 billion from Nvidia, but says Microsoft is still its best friend forever

More money for the money god. OpenAI has announced a new $110 billion investment in its business, which breaks down to include $30 billion from Nvidia, $30 billion from Japanese investment titan SoftBank, and $50 billion from everything-else-giant, Amazon.

"We’ve also signed a strategic partnership with Amazon and secured next-generation inference compute with Nvidia", says the company. "Additional financial investors are expected to join as the round progresses."

On the Nvidia news, OpenAI says that its "long standing collaboration" with the company now includes the use of "3 GW of dedicated inference capacity and 2 GW of training on Vera Rubin systems."

"This builds on Hopper and Blackwell systems already in operation across Microsoft, OCI, and CoreWeave."

Nvidia's Vera Rubin AI superchips are scheduled for release in the second half of this year, but it looks like OpenAI is leaping ahead of the queue and securing a fair amount of training capacity already.

In terms of rhetoric, it's certainly a different tone to the one struck earlier this month where rumours persisted that OpenAI was unhappy with team green's AI GPUs, and that Nvidia was having second thoughts about pumping $100 billion into the company.

On that note, it's not clear as to whether Nvidia's $30 billion investment is a new adjustment of that overall figure, or merely what the company plans to invest in this particular round. Watch this space, I guess.

Still, while OpenAI, Nvidia, and Amazon are now strengthening their ties in the ever-spinning merry-go-round that is AI investment, it looks like the former is keen to get the jump on any suggestions that its relationship with Microsoft is any worse off. In a separate post, OpenAI said:

"As conversations around AI investments and partnerships grow and as OpenAI announces new funding and new partners as they did today, we want to ensure these announcements are understood within the existing construct of our [Microsoft] partnership."

"Nothing about today’s announcements in any way changes the terms of the Microsoft and OpenAI relationship", OpenAI continues. "The partnership remains strong and central."

As if to really ram that message home, the next few points come under bolded headings that include:

"Our IP relationship continues unchanged."

"Our commercial and revenue share relationship remains unchanged."

"Azure remains the exclusive cloud provider of stateless OpenAI APIs."

"The partnership supports OpenAI's growth."

Is all that understood? OpenAI, Nvidia, and Amazon are definitely mates, but Microsoft remains its best friend forever, and there should be absolutely no speculation otherwise. I'm glad we could clear all that up.