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Sam Altman at BlackRock Infrastructure Summit Held In Washington, DC
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OpenAI is now valued at $852 billion — that’s about 5 Disneys

The company just closed out the biggest funding round in Silicon Valley history, raising $122 billion.

Tom Jones

Imagine what it could have been worth if it hadn’t shut down Sora!

OpenAI, the behemoth behind ChatGPT and still very much the cash-burning mass at the center of the AI universe, just closed out the biggest funding round in Silicon Valley history, raising a total of $122 billion and taking its current valuation to a genuinely staggering $852 billion.

The vast majority of the latest round comes from just three companies: Nvidia and SoftBank stumped up $30 billion apiece, while Amazon chipped in (a very much conditional) $50 billion — with the remainder made up of smaller sums from Andreessen Horowitz, MGX, and a host of other investors, per Bloomberg reporting.

Sam Altman’s company is now expected to IPO before the end of the year, according to reports, and the latest raise puts it well ahead of competitor Anthropic, which makes the Claude suite of products and raised a somewhat paltry by comparison $30 billion last month at a $380 billion valuation.

With its new jaw-dropping valuation, OpenAI is also now worth a great deal more than some of the biggest names in US business history.

OpenAI 2026 valuation chart
Sherwood News

All told, the AI giant is now valued at roughly the same as McDonald’s ($222 billion), Disney ($171 billion), Boeing ($156 billion), Uber ($148 billion), Comcast ($105 billion), and Ford ($46 billion)... combined.

Considering the insane deals the company has struck as of late, it shouldn’t find it too difficult to part ways with its newly raised capital.

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Alphabet sold $3.6 billion in Japanese yen bonds — a record for a foreign company — likely to help its AI capex binge

We now have the value for Alphabet’s Japanese yen bond raise — 576.5 billion yen, or $3.6 billion — and it’s a record for a foreign issuer in Japan. The deal was spread across seven tranches with maturities ranging from 3 to 40 years, allowing the company to lock in rates as low as 1.965%.

The latest deal comes on the heels of Alphabet’s massive US and European bond deals, where the company has tapped global markets for nearly $60 billion in fresh capital over the last few months. In a filing earlier this week, the search giant said it would use the proceeds for “general corporate purposes.” That likely means fueling its AI infrastructure build-out, which has pushed its projected 2026 capex bill to a staggering $190 billion.

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Rani Molla

Bloomberg: Relationship between OpenAI and Apple has deteriorated and legal action may be imminent

The two-year-old alliance between Apple and OpenAI has deteriorated, Bloomberg reports, with the AI giant now consulting legal counsel about issuing a potential breach of contract notice.

OpenAI executives allege that Apple failed to adequately integrate and promote ChatGPT on the iPhone, causing the AI firm to lose out on billions a year in subscriptions and hurt its brand, according to the report.

Meanwhile, Apple has expressed concerns over OpenAI’s privacy protection, and has been miffed that OpenAI has been working on its own hardware with former Apple design lead Jony Ive.

More recently, Apple, which has trailed its peers in developing AI, has decided to offer users their choice of AI models, rather than aligning exclusively with OpenAI’s.

Meanwhile, Apple has expressed concerns over OpenAI’s privacy protection, and has been miffed that OpenAI has been working on its own hardware with former Apple design lead Jony Ive.

More recently, Apple, which has trailed its peers in developing AI, has decided to offer users their choice of AI models, rather than aligning exclusively with OpenAI’s.

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