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according to theinformation, masayoshi son’s softbank group invested us$500 million in openai, with the latest round of financing valuing it at more than us$150 billion.

the recent departure of mira murati and other senior executives, as well as the shift from a non-profit company to a profit model, have plunged openai into various negative public opinions. but it seems to have had no impact on its latest round of financing, which has been oversubscribed.

masayoshi son’s investment in openai was not just a random investment in ai. instead, he had been researching it for more than a year. at the same time, he had made heavy bets on product research and development and ai chips in preparation for a big move.

in fact, as early as september 17, 2023, the financial times revealed that masayoshi son hopes to continue investing tens of billions of dollars in the field of ai, and openai has become one of the main targets.

son zhengyi once publicly stated,he is a heavy user of chatgpt and chats with it almost every day. he also has a close relationship with sam altman, co-founder and ceo of openai, and has held many talks to discuss the development prospects and technology trends of generative ai such as chatgpt.

in addition to investment, softbank also established a wholly-owned subsidiary called "sb intuitions" last year to focus on the development of japanese chatgpt-like generative ai products.

softbank said that it is generally believed that softbank is relatively negative towards generative ai such as chatgtp, but it is actually very positive. most conferences last year talked about content related to chatgpt, and they were very optimistic about its future development.

and an email has been sent internally to all employees allowing the use of chatgpt at work. however, you must comply with trade secret protection laws during use, and confidential information cannot be shared.

on july 11 this year, in order to further expand its investment in the ai ​​field, softbank fully acquired the british ai chip company graphcore and became its wholly-owned subsidiary.

graphcore was founded in 2016 and is headquartered in bristol, uk, co-founded by nigel toon and simon knowles. its core product is the ipu, a highly parallel computing device specifically designed to accelerate the training and inference of large machine learning models.

ipu is different from traditional cpu and gpu architectures and can handle complex ai computing tasks more efficiently, providing higher performance and energy efficiency ratio.

graphcore's ipu adopts a graph processing architecture and can perform well in large-scale parallel computing. this architecture is suitable for processing graph-structured data in deep learning, such as nodes and connections in neural networks.

its products are used in a wide range of applications, including autonomous driving, natural language processing, computer vision, medical research and financial services, etc. it uses ipu to accelerate the development and deployment of its large ai models.

although openai is mired in negative news, its financial performance is still quite impressive. according to the new york times,its revenue in august alone exceeded us$300 million, an increase of 1,700% year-on-year., the product’s monthly active users have reached 350 million, and its revenue this year is expected to reach us$3.7 billion. if it transforms into a profitable company, its revenue next year is estimated to exceed us$10 billion.

therefore, these are important bargaining chips to attract investors. in addition to softbank, thrive capital is expected to invest about us$750 million in this round of financing, microsoft will invest us$1 billion, and it will also receive revolving credit from large banks. additional $5 billion in debt financing.