OpenAI gets $5.8b credit line, full liquidity to 'scale'
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The news: OpenAI secured a USD4 billion ($5.84 billion) revolving credit line on top of its just completed USD6.6 billion equity fundraising, giving the ChatGPT creator liquidity to fund new initiatives and “operate with full agility as we scale,” the company said Thursday.
The numbers: The new financing was announced just a day after closing its record fundraising, with several banks funding the credit line, including JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Banco Santander, Wells Fargo, Sumitomo Mitsui, UBS and HSBC.
The context: OpenAI’s fundraising is the largest VC deal ever, nearly doubling its valuation in less than a year to USD157 billion and becoming one of the three largest venture-backed startups after SpaceX and ByteDance.
Since launching ChatGPT in 2022, OpenAI has been at the forefront of AI development, but at a big cost, as training its models requires massive amounts of energy, computing power and data, all of which comes with a high price.
What they said: “We have really big aspirations of, how do we keep investing and what drives this technology?” CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC in an interview.
“It’s compute first, and it’s not cheap. It’s great talent second. And then, of course, it’s all the normal operating expenses of a more traditional company.”
The source: OpenAI statement
