SoftBank is close to finalizing a $40 billion primary investment in OpenAI at a $260 billion pre-money valuation, sources told CNBC’s David Faber.
SoftBank would pay out the funding, which would mean a $300 billion post-money valuation for OpenAI, over the next 12 to 24 months, with the first payment coming as soon as spring, Faber reported Friday. SoftBank would be able to syndicate as much as $10 billion of the amount.
The new funding would mean SoftBank surpasses Microsoft as the artificial intelligence startup’s top backer. OpenAI was last valued at $157 billion by private investors in October.
The round was initially expected to award OpenAI a valuation of $340 billion, but a source familiar with the matter later told CNBC that the amount would be closer to $300 billion.
Part of the funding is expected to be used for OpenAI’s commitment to Stargate, sources told CNBC. Stargate is a joint venture between SoftBank, OpenAI and Oracle that was announced by President Donald Trump in January. The plan calls for billions of dollars to be invested in U.S. AI infrastructure.
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OpenAI launched its ChatGPT chatbot in late 2022, kicking off the generative AI race. Since then, the company has aggressively competed against the likes of Elon Musk’s xAI, as well as Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta and Anthropic. The generative AI market is predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade.
The latest funding round comes after SoftBank on Monday committed to spending $3 billion per year on OpenAI’s tech for itself and its subsidiaries, including British chip designer Arm. SoftBank and OpenAI also announced a joint venture, billed as “SB OpenAI Japan,” which will market OpenAI’s enterprise tech to companies in Japan.
OpenAI in January released ChatGPT Gov, an AI platform built specifically for the U.S. government. The startup pitched the new platform as having more security than ChatGPT Enterprise. ChatGPT Gov will allow government agencies to feed “non-public, sensitive information” into OpenAI’s models while operating within their own secure hosting environments, the company said.
The government offering follows a series of moves by OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman that appeared to be aimed at appeasing Trump. Altman contributed $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, attended the event alongside other tech CEOs and has publicly signaled his admiration for the president.
OpenAI’s new funding comes after Chinese rival DeepSeek saw its app soar to the top of Apple’s App Store rankings in January after its debut. DeepSeek’s breakthrough R1 model roiled U.S. markets on reports that the powerful model was trained at a fraction of the cost of U.S. competitors’ models.
Altman described DeepSeek’s R1 as “impressive,” and wrote on X that “we will obviously deliver much better models and also it’s legit invigorating to have a new competitor!”
Synopsys logo is seen displayed on a smartphone with the flag of China in the background.
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The U.S. government has rescinded its export restrictions on chip design software to China, U.S.-based Synopsys announced Thursday.
“Synopsys is working to restore access to the recently restricted products in China,” it said in a statement.
The U.S. had reportedly told several chip design software companies, including Synopsys, in May that they were required to obtain licenses before exporting goods, such as software and chemicals for semiconductors, to China.
The U.S. Commerce Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.
The news comes after China signaled last week that they are making progress on a trade truce with the U.S. and confirmed conditional agreements to resume some exchanges of rare earths and advanced technology.
The Datadog stand is being displayed on day one of the AWS Summit Seoul 2024 at the COEX Convention and Exhibition Center in Seoul, South Korea, on May 16, 2024.
Chris Jung | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Datadog shares were up 10% in extended trading on Wednesday after S&P Global said the monitoring software provider will replace Juniper Networks in the S&P 500 U.S. stock index.
S&P Global is making the change effective before the beginning of trading on July 9, according to a statement.
Computer server maker Hewlett Packard Enterprise, also a constituent of the index, said earlier on Wednesday that it had completed its acquisition of Juniper, which makes data center networking hardware. HPE disclosed in a filing that it paid $13.4 billion to Juniper shareholders.
Over the weekend, the two companies reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department, which had sued in opposition to the deal. As part of the settlement, HPE agreed to divest its global Instant On campus and branch business.
While tech already makes up an outsized portion of the S&P 500, the index has has been continuously lifting its exposure as the industry expands into more areas of society.
Stocks often rally when they’re added to a major index, as fund managers need to rebalance their portfolios to reflect the changes.
New York-based Datadog went public in 2019. The company generated $24.6 million in net income on $761.6 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2025, according to a statement. Competitors include Cisco, which bought Splunk last year, as well as Elastic and cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon and Microsoft.
Datadog has underperformed the broader tech sector so far this year. The stock was down 5.5% as of Wednesday’s close, while the Nasdaq was up 5.6%. Still, with a market cap of $46.6 billion, Datadog’s valuation is significantly higher than the median for that index.
A representation of cryptocurrency Ethereum is placed on a PC motherboard in this illustration taken on June 16, 2023.
Dado Ruvic | Reuters
Stocks tied to the price of ether, better known as ETH, were higher on Wednesday, reflecting renewed enthusiasm for the crypto asset amid a surge of interest in stablecoins and tokenization.
“We’re finally at the point where real use cases are emerging, and stablecoins have been the first version of that at scale but they’re going to open the door to a much bigger story around tokenizing other assets and using digital assets in new ways,” Devin Ryan, head of financial technology research at Citizens.
On Tuesday, as bitcoin ETFs snapped a 15-day streak of inflows, ether ETFs saw $40 million in inflows led by BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust. ETH ETFs came back to life in June after much concern that they were becoming zombie funds.
The price of the coin itself was last higher by 5%, according to Coin Metrics, though it’s still down 24% this year.
Ethereum has been struggling with an identity crisis fueled by uncertainty about the network’s value proposition, weaker revenue since its last big technical upgrade and increasing competition from Solana. Market volatility, driven by geopolitical uncertainty this year, has not helped.
The Ethereum network’s smart contracts capability makes it a prominent platform for the tokenization of traditional assets, which includes U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins. Fundstrat’s Tom Lee this week called Ethereum “the backbone and architecture” of stablecoins. Both Tether (USDT) and Circle‘s USD Coin (USDC) are issued on the network.
BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund (known as BUIDL, which stands for USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund) also launched on Ethereum last year before expanding to other blockchain networks.
Tokenization is the process of issuing digital representations on a blockchain network of publicly traded securities, real world assets or any other form of value. Holders of tokenized assets don’t have outright ownership of the assets themselves.
The latest wave of interest in ETH-related assets follows an announcement by Robinhood this week that it will enable trading of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs across Europe, after a groundswell of interest in stablecoins throughout June following Circle’s IPO and the Senate passage of its proposed stablecoin bill, the GENIUS Act.
Ether, which turns 10 years old at the end of July, is sitting about 75% off its all-time high.
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