OpenAI currently holds the record for the largest private funding round in startup history, and it got there by breaking its own record. The ChatGPT-maker recently closed a $122 billion round at a $852 billion valuation, surpassing the $40 billion raise it completed just 12 months earlier, which was itself the largest single investment ever recorded at the time.
No private company has ever reached this $122 billion figure. And despite this massive achievement, one would expect OpenAI to be on the track to profitability. But that is not the case. Deutsche Bank has projected that the company will lose as much as $143 billion between now and 2029 before it makes a profit.
The Bank has gone as far as describing this situation as “uncharted territory” in startup history, explaining that OpenAI is the startup that has received the most investment in history and is also the startup that has lost the most money before ever turning a profit.
OpenAI Breaking The Record
Before OpenAI entered the picture, the largest private funding raise ever recorded belonged to Ant Group, the Chinese financial services company, which raised $14 billion in 2018. That was followed by Juul Labs at $12.8 billion and Chinese ride-sharing company DiDi Global at $10.8 billion. Those figures served as benchmarks for years.
OpenAI cleared all of them in March 2025, when it finalized a $40 billion round led by Japan’s SoftBank, with a valuation of $300 billion. Then, less than a year later, that record was gone too.
The February 2026 round brought in $110 billion at a $730 billion pre-money valuation, with $30 billion from SoftBank, $30 billion from Nvidia, and $50 billion from Amazon. By the time the round closed in March, the total had grown to $122 billion, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, D.E. Shaw Ventures, TPG, and Microsoft, pushing the post-money valuation to $852 billion.
For context, venture capitalists invested a total of $170 billion into all U.S. startups combined in 2023. OpenAI raised $122 billion on its own in a single round.
It is important to note that this investment is not happening in a vacuum. OpenAI’s user and revenue figures are genuinely large. ChatGPT now has more than 900 million weekly active users and over 50 million paying subscribers. The company’s revenue has also grown from $2 billion in 2023 to $6 billion in 2024 and to over $20 billion by the end of 2025; and is currently generating $2 billion in revenue every month.
Enterprise customers now make up more than 40 percent of OpenAI’s revenue, and paying business users crossed 9 million as of February 2026. By almost any measure of user adoption and revenue growth, the numbers are moving in the right direction.
However, there seems to be the issue of profitability, as revenue growth alone does not tell the full story.
The Other Side of the Record
Despite the funding and the revenue growth, OpenAI is spending far more than it earns, leaving no room for profit.
Back in December 2025, Jim Reid, managing director, global head of macro research and thematic strategy at Deutsche Bank wrote that “no startup in history has operated with losses on anything approaching this scale.” Four months into 2026, the statement still holds.
To understand this scale, Uber lost about $30 billion from the time it went public until it reached profitability in 2023, while Amazon took nearly ten years and about $3 billion in losses before it turned a profit. OpenAI’s projected losses between now and profitability, whenever that may be, are far larger than all of these figures combined.
As such, the startup is now in a category that did not exist before it came into play.
Why OpenAI Is Burning So Much Money
The core reason OpenAI spends so much is computing. Training and running large AI models requires enormous amounts of processing power, and that processing power is expensive to buy and maintain.
Every time someone sends a message to ChatGPT, OpenAI’s servers process that request using specialised chips that cost a lot of money to run around the clock. At over 900 million weekly users sending billions of messages, those costs reach billions of dollars every year.
Beyond the day-to-day running costs, OpenAI is also building for the future. The Stargate Project, a joint venture between OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle, is targeting up to $500 billion in AI infrastructure investment across the United States by 2029.
The company’s position is that owning this infrastructure is what will make the business profitable at scale eventually. In other words, the more computing power OpenAI owns, the cheaper it becomes to serve each user, and the more users it can serve.
What Happens Next
The picture that emerges from all of this is of a company building fast because the structure of its own funding leaves little to no room to slow down. Despite the record-breaking raise, the $122 billion only gives OpenAI roughly 18 to 24 months of operational funding before it needs to raise again.
In fact, the structure of this recent funding adds to the pressure. Amazon’s remaining $35 billion, which is the largest single chunk of the entire round, is tied to conditions that sources say include OpenAI completing an IPO or achieving AGI by the end of the year.
SoftBank, on the other hand, took out a $40 billion loan from JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and four Japanese banks to cover its own $30 billion commitment, with a 12-month repayment window. For OpenAI, that loan does not get paid back unless there is a major financial event coming, and the most obvious one is an IPO.
So the IPO is not simply something OpenAI is planning; It is something the structure of its own funding is pushing it towards. Reuters recently reported that OpenAI is considering filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as early as the second half of 2026, with a listing target of 2027 at a valuation of up to $1 trillion. If it goes ahead, it would be the largest public listing in history, surpassing Saudi Aramco’s $25.6 billion raise in 2019.
The company that has broken every private funding record is now being pushed toward breaking the public one too, and not entirely by ambition, but by the weight and pressure of the investments it has received so far.
For now, the investors backing OpenAI are betting that revenue keeps growing, that the cost of running AI models comes down as the technology matures, and that no competitor closes the gap before the ChatGPT-maker reaches profitability.
