February 27, 2026
Cash geyser or cash bonfire?
OpenAI's $110B funding round (investments from Amazon, Nvidia, SoftBank)
Wall Street rains $110B on OpenAI — fans cheer, skeptics ask “but where’s the profit?”
TLDR: OpenAI is reportedly raising $110B at an $840B valuation, with big checks from Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank and a new Amazon cloud-and-chips pact, while Microsoft stays in the mix. The community is split between “this is a bubble” skeptics and “coding agents will pay for it” believers.
OpenAI just hit the money cannon: a reported $110B raise that would value the ChatGPT maker at a jaw-dropping $840B, with Amazon ($50B), Nvidia ($30B), and SoftBank ($30B) piling in ahead of a possible IPO. Amazon’s also locking in 2 gigawatts of computing on its in-house Trainium chips and making AWS the exclusive outside cloud for OpenAI’s enterprise platform, while Microsoft still hosts OpenAI’s main products and APIs. Reuters says Nvidia’s earlier “up to $100B” pledge is murky. Translation: huge cash, complicated alliances, and one very busy data center.
But the comments are where the sparks fly. The top chorus is pure skepticism: “Where’s the revenue? Where’s the profit?” Users like sethops1 and giancarlostoro call out “circular deals” and ask how long OpenAI could keep the lights on without fresh money. One joker deadpanned, “$110B a year doesn’t last long if you’re losing $40B a quarter,” while others groaned that SoftBank’s involvement is “never a great signal.” Meanwhile, IPO-watchers like konschubert say they’ll sit out “retail prices,” arguing AI can change the world and still be a terrible business.
On the other side, optimists shout “demand, demand, demand.” Commenters like alecco claim coding agents—AI helpers that write and run code—went from side projects to the main event, “dominating token demand.” The thread devolved into memes about “2 gigawatts? Great Scott!” and jokes about joint-custody cloud parents: Amazon for enterprise, Microsoft for everything else. Is this a rocket ship or a cash bonfire? The internet can’t decide—only the IPO will tell. Read the Reuters report for the receipts.
Key Points
- •OpenAI is raising $110 billion, valuing the company at $840 billion, ahead of an expected IPO later this year.
- •Amazon is investing $50 billion, with $15 billion initially and $35 billion later upon meeting conditions, and will supply 2 GW of Trainium-powered compute.
- •AWS will be the exclusive third-party cloud provider for OpenAI Frontier.
- •Microsoft Azure remains the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI’s APIs and hosting for first-party products; Microsoft retains exclusive license and IP access.
- •Nvidia is investing $30 billion, but it is unclear whether this replaces its earlier announced up-to-$100 billion commitment.