This places the artificial intelligence firm among the world’s most valuable private technology companies ahead of a possible stock market debut.

The Series H round drew backing from investment firms including Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Sequoia Capital, Capital Group, Coatue and D1 Capital Partners.

Investors such as Baillie Gifford, Blackstone, Brookfield, DST Global and Fidelity Management & Research also joined the round.

The funding package also includes $15 billion in previously committed investments from large cloud companies, including $5 billion from Amazon announced earlier this year.

Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron joined the round as strategic infrastructure partners.

With the funding, Anthropic plans to expand computing capacity, grow its Claude products and continue research into safety and interpretability.

The company announced the funding on the same day it released Claude Opus 4.8, its latest model focused on coding, advanced reasoning and what it described as stronger honesty and self-correction abilities.

Anthropic has expanded rapidly since its last fundraising round in February, helped by rising demand from business customers using Claude Code and other enterprise tools. The company said its annualised revenue run rate passed $47 billion earlier this month.

“Claude is increasingly indispensable to our growing global community of customers, and we work tirelessly to make tools like Claude Code and Cowork more helpful, more powerful, and more adaptable to their needs,” said Krishna Rao, chief financial officer of Anthropic.

“This funding will help us serve the historic demand we are experiencing, stay at the research frontier, and bring Claude to more of the places where work happens.”

The company also said it recently signed new agreements with Amazon, Google, Broadcom and SpaceX to secure more computing power as demand for Claude grows.

Under those agreements, Amazon will provide up to five gigawatts of additional capacity, while Google and Broadcom will supply next-generation TPU infrastructure. SpaceX will also provide access to GPU capacity through its Colossus systems.

Anthropic revealed that Claude is now available across Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, with AWS remaining its main cloud and training partner.

“Claude’s latest advancements have driven large-scale adoption among the world’s most demanding organisations. This momentum positions Anthropic to lead the next phase of AI innovation and capture the enormous opportunity ahead,” said Brad Gerstner, founder and CEO of Altimeter Capital.

Marc Stad, managing partner at Dragoneer, said, “The technological progress we are seeing right now is breathtaking. And we believe that we are still in the earliest days of both the development and commercialisation of this technology.”

Neil Mehta, founder and managing partner at Greenoaks, added, “Rarely has a company’s culture, mission, and commercial momentum reinforced each other so completely. We are honoured to deepen our partnership.”

With competition increasing among leading artificial intelligence companies seeking more users, stronger computing infrastructure and fresh investment before entering public markets, Anthropic’s latest raise will strengthen its place.

Earlier this year, OpenAI secured a funding round valued at $852 billion after investment, while Elon Musk’s xAI, now merged with SpaceX, has reportedly targeted a $2 trillion valuation ahead of a future public offering.

People familiar with the talks say investors have already made early offers in the range of $850 billion to $900 billion but the company has not accepted any of them.

Discussions are still at an early stage, and nothing has been agreed.

Several investors are trying to secure large stakes, with some offers said to be worth up to $50 billion in new capital. A decision is expected at a board meeting in May.

Anthropic last raised funds in February and that round brought in $30 billion, valuing the company at $380 billion. If this new round goes through at the higher valuation being discussed, it would mark a surge in a matter of months.

The move would also change its position in the market as OpenAI was valued at about $852 billion in March after a major funding round, but a deal at $900 billion would place Anthropic ahead as the most valuable artificial intelligence startup.

The company has received backing from major technology firms. Google has committed billions of dollars, with more funding tied to performance targets. Amazon has also invested heavily and plans to increase its stake over time.

Anthropic declined to comment when contacted.

Revenue growth has supported the surge in investor interest with the company’s annual revenue run rate passing $30 billion earlier this year and is now said to be approaching $40 billion.

Growth has come from demand for its Claude models, especially tools built for coding and business use.

Recent releases include new versions of its core systems and a cybersecurity-focused model with limited access due to safety issues.

There is also a public listing under consideration. Bloomberg reported that an initial public offering could come as soon as October. If that plan holds, this funding round may be the last before the company goes public.

The funding round was led by VoLo Earth Ventures, which focuses on climate-related technologies. The company said the investment will help it grow its team, build its platform and strengthen talks with large technology firms.

Spending on data centres is expected to reach nearly $700 billion this year, driven largely by AI workloads. At the same time, energy use from these facilities is projected to double by 2028.

Refiant is trying to tackle that problem by making AI models smaller and less power-hungry. The company said it has already compressed a 120 billion parameter model so it can run on a standard laptop. Normally, such a model would require far more powerful hardware.

According to the company, the compressed version runs on a MacBook Pro with 12GB of memory. It keeps between 95% and 99% of its original performance. It can also run alongside another model on the same device.

Sid Gutta, co-founder of Refiant, said: “AI’s growing energy footprint is one of the most urgent and underappreciated challenges in the climate space. The industry’s default answer is to build more data centres and consume more power. Ours is to make the AI itself dramatically more efficient.”

The company, based in California, said it tested energy use inside a Faraday cage to ensure accurate readings. Under those conditions, the system reached about 3,000 tokens per kilowatt-hour.

That is up to 100 times more efficient than running the same model in a traditional data centre.

In practical terms, the energy used for one AI task on standard infrastructure could handle about 100 similar tasks using Refiant’s approach.

The founders argue that improving efficiency is a better long-term path than expanding infrastructure. Running AI locally on smaller machines could also help organisations avoid sending data to large cloud providers, which usually means higher costs and less management.

Recent developments from Google have pointed in a similar direction. Its TurboQuant compression method reduced memory needs significantly, reinforcing interest in making models leaner rather than simply scaling hardware.

Dr Viroshan Naicker, co-founder of Refiant, said: “The AI industry is spending hundreds of billions scaling infrastructure when the real breakthrough is the ability to do more with radically less. Nature doesn’t build by brute force. Evolution optimises. We’ve applied that principle to AI, and the results speak for themselves.”

The company believes its work could also help businesses balance AI adoption with environmental targets.

Mathew Haswell, another co-founder, said: “Those two mandates don’t have to be in tension. AI adoption and sustainability commitments can coexist, but only if the technology itself becomes more efficient. 

“Organisations shouldn’t have to choose between deploying AI and meeting their energy targets – and they shouldn’t have to send their data halfway around the world to do it.”

Joseph Goodman, managing partner at VoLo Earth Ventures, added: “AI’s biggest constraint isn’t demand, it’s energy. What’s been missing is a fundamentally more efficient way to compute.

“Refiant’s architecture replaces brute-force scaling with a far more efficient, nature-inspired approach that lowers energy use while increasing capability. That’s the kind of breakthrough needed to make AI sustainable on a global scale.”

Refiant said it is already in discussions with several multinational firms. It plans to push its technology further, with a focus on stronger compression, longer context handling and better tracking of how models operate.

This is its fourth straight quarterly increase, with earnings boosted by the value of its investment in OpenAI. 

SoftBank has invested more than $30 billion, holding 11% of the AI firm. By the end of December, it expects total profits from this investment to reach $19.8 billion.

OpenAI is reportedly preparing a new funding round, valued at $830 billion and SoftBank may invest an additional $30 billion alongside Amazon and Nvidia. 

Analysts warn that the conglomerate is now being seen as a publicly traded proxy for OpenAI.

To fund its investments, SoftBank sold parts of its holdings in Nvidia and T-Mobile, raised bonds, and also borrowed against other holdings such as chip designer Arm and its domestic telecom unit, SoftBank Corp. 

The company’s loan-to-value ratio rose to 20.6% in December, up from 16.5% three months earlier. Cash reserves fell to ¥3.8 trillion over the same period.

Masayoshi Son, SoftBank founder and CEO, directly owns 17% of Vision Fund 2, the investment vehicle holding the OpenAI stake. The fund recorded $2.4 billion in valuation profits from OpenAI in the quarter, adding to cumulative profits of $19.8 billion over nine months.

SoftBank’s shares rose 2.4% on the day of the earnings release, slightly ahead of a flat market. The results reveal the company’s heavy focus on AI, showing both the possible rewards and the risks of concentrating investments in a single firm.

From what has emerged so far, Nvidia is weighing the largest cheque. The chipmaker, already central to OpenAI’s operations, is considering an investment of up to $30 billion. 

Microsoft, which has backed OpenAI from the start, is discussing a much smaller top-up of under $10 billion. Amazon, entering the picture for the first time, could commit well above $10 billion and possibly exceed $20 billion.

The discussions are said to be advanced. Term sheets are close, implying the talks have moved beyond early signalling into concrete commitments. None of the companies has confirmed the details. 

Amazon and Microsoft declined to comment, while Nvidia and OpenAI did not respond outside normal business hours.

This would form the core of a funding round that could reach $100 billion. That figure alone changes the scale of the story. At that level, OpenAI’s valuation would rise to around $830 billion, placing it ahead of every private company globally and within touching distance of the largest names on the S&P 500.

SoftBank is also circling. The Japanese group is reportedly in discussions to add up to $30 billion of its own, which would further tilt the round into record territory. 

Nvidia’s involvement helps lock in demand for its chips, which remain essential for training and running large models. Amazon’s interest goes beyond a simple equity stake. 

Its investment is tied to separate negotiations, including a possible expansion of OpenAI’s use of Amazon’s cloud servers and a commercial deal that would see OpenAI’s products sold through Amazon’s enterprise channels. 

For Microsoft, any fresh funding would strengthen an already tight integration between OpenAI’s technology and its own software and cloud services, even as regulators watch.

Behind the OpenAI funding round, the cost of training and operating large models keeps climbing, running into billions of dollars each year. Competition is also strengthening. 

Alphabet is pushing hard with its own systems, and competitors are striking partnerships to close the gap. 

The capital would give OpenAI room to expand and invest aggressively, but it also accentuates how much cash the business burns to stay at the frontier. 

The talks are described as “very fluid,” and no final decision has been made.

The potential investment comes as competition within the tech industry increases over AI computing power. OpenAI has already signed multi-billion-dollar agreements with Nvidia, Oracle, and Microsoft, as well as a $38-billion cloud services deal with Amazon in November.

“OpenAI plans to use Amazon’s Trainium chips,” The Information reported, which compete with Nvidia and Google’s chips. The report also revealed that Amazon’s funding could lead to a fundraising round with other investors. 

OpenAI is exploring selling an enterprise version of ChatGPT to Amazon, though it is murky if this would include integration with Amazon’s own shopping features.

The talks stress OpenAI’s transition from its non-profit roots. The company restructured in 2023 as a public benefit corporation controlled by a non-profit with a financial stake, removing limitations to raising capital and securing computing resources. Microsoft now holds a 27% stake in OpenAI and has exclusive rights to sell its models to Azure customers.

OpenAI is also preparing for an initial public offering in 2026 that could value the company at up to $1 trillion, Reuters reported in October, potentially making it one of the largest tech listings ever. 

Reports say an Amazon investment could complicate the current Microsoft arrangement and may lead to multi-cloud distribution of OpenAI models.

Despite the surge in AI investment, investors are being careful. The global AI market is expected to surpass $300 billion annually by 2027, but profitability and the sustainability of massive infrastructure spending are still concerns.

OpenAI, Amazon, and Microsoft did not respond to requests for comment.

The fresh capital lifts the firm’s total funding to $16 million and enhances its real-time discovery technology deeper into global retail, marketplaces, and travel platforms.

The round was led by MMC Ventures with backing from Redalpine, Daphni and a group of angels. The company’s system already handles billions of live interactions each month and delivers tens of millions of predictions for partners across several industries.

The startup was created in 2024 by Dr Kevin Kahn and Dr Matteo Ruffini, both former Amazon AI leaders, alongside entrepreneur Johan Boissard. They argue that the growth of generative AI has overshadowed the need to understand how people behave, browse, and change their minds in real time.

Most recommendation engines still work off batch-trained models and recycled data. They guess based on what users liked yesterday. Albatross takes a different route. 

Its transformer-based architecture reads live activity, learns from it instantly, and adjusts results within milliseconds, without any manual retraining. According to the company, no previous system has been able to adapt at this speed.

Speaking on the company’s mission, Dr Kahn, co-founder and CEO, said: “Our mission is to close the discovery gap. Everyone has felt the frustration of seeing the same generic recommendations over and over. Our system perceives and adapts instantly, so every search and feed reflects the user’s intent at that very moment. 

“From our conversations with a broad range of CEOs, we know they all want to adopt AI, but most efforts fail because they treat it as an add-on. The real opportunity is to rethink how experiences are shaped, to make every interaction intelligent, adaptive, and alive. That’s what Albatross does: it learns and reasons in real time, understanding intent the moment it happens.”

The company’s flagship tools, the Real-Time Discovery Feed and the Multimodal Search engine, are designed to enhance what users see as their behaviour shifts. The system can connect online and in-store journeys, react to image inputs, and run at near-zero latency.

Early trials have delivered strong results, with some partners recording triple-digit growth in engagement and product discovery. Deployment takes less than seven weeks, and the platform now powers what the team presented at RecSys 2025 as the industry’s most advanced approach to cold-start discovery.

For investors, the timing shows a change in how personalisation technology is evolving. Mina Samaan, General Partner at MMC Ventures, said: “Personalisation is entering a new era. Albatross moves beyond static algorithms to build systems that understand context as it happens. Their real-time architecture represents a step change for how businesses engage customers online.”

Redalpine, which led the startup’s first round, also increased its commitment. Dr Marc Moesser, Investor at Redalpine, said: “We backed Albatross from the very beginning because of the team’s exceptional depth in AI and personalisation. In just a year, they’ve gone beyond what even the largest platforms achieve with real-time infrastructure that adapts instantly to user behaviour.”

Albatross seeks to build systems that react as quickly as the people using them, and remake the online discovery experience in the process.

Morgan Stanley, which led the deal, confirmed on Monday that xAI had closed a $5 billion debt financing round made up of secured notes and term loans. 

The deal, according to the bank, was oversubscribed and attracted major institutional investors across the globe.

Simultaneously, xAI closed a separate $5 billion strategic equity investment. Though the identities of the backers have not been disclosed, Bloomberg previously reported that the startup had been negotiating a $4.3 billion equity round with investors. 

That conversation is part of a larger funding goal, Musk’s team is reportedly looking to raise as much as $20 billion in equity that could push the company’s valuation beyond $120 billion. Some insiders are even betting on a $200 billion ceiling.

The funds are earmarked for aggressive expansion. A key priority is scaling up computing infrastructure through data centres tailored to handle vast AI workloads. 

The capital will also accelerate development of Grok, xAI’s core conversational platform integrated into X (formerly Twitter), and help the company move toward building its own custom chips, codenamed “Gigafab”, to reduce dependence on Nvidia’s high-demand GPUs.

Musk launched xAI in 2023 after parting ways with OpenAI, the company he co-founded. He has positioned xAI as a rival not just to OpenAI, but also to players like Google DeepMind and Anthropic. 

His approach is more unorthodox, Grok is marketed as a “rebellious” chatbot, an alternative to the more filtered responses seen in other models.

The debt raise and equity injection together represent one of the largest combined funding moves by a private tech startup in recent memory. 

It comes as global competition increases. OpenAI has a $51 billion partnership with Microsoft, while Amazon has poured $4 billion into Anthropic. These alliances are about access to compute power, chips, and distribution.

“The deal was oversubscribed and included prominent global debt investors,” Morgan Stanley stated in a post on X.

Musk has previously argued that building AGI, artificial general intelligence, requires vertical control over data, chips, energy, and distribution. This latest funding round gives xAI the firepower to attempt just that.

xAI has not issued a formal statement regarding the funding, and representatives did not respond to requests for comment at the time of filing. 

But then, we see that Musk is going all-in on building a scalable AI ecosystem, and investors, despite earlier doubts, are willing to put serious money behind it.

Morgan Stanley, the lead banker for xAI, is currently looking to raise $5 billion through a debt offering. In meetings held with prospective investors willing to commit a minimum of $50 million, the bank revealed selected internal figures outlining xAI’s long-term financial targets and current losses.

According to information shared with those investors, xAI generated $52 million in gross revenue during Q1 but recorded a loss of $341 million before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA). 

Cash flow from operations was negative $220 million. The company had already spent $2.6 billion on capital expenditures and has plans to spend another $18 billion on data centre investments.

Even with the deep red figures, xAI expects a sharp turnaround over the next five years. Forecasts presented show the company hitting $2.7 billion in EBITDA by 2027 and climbing to $13.1 billion by 2029. 

On the revenue side, the company aims to close 2025 with $1 billion in gross income and projects $14 billion by the end of 2029.

These figures come as xAI simultaneously seeks a $113 billion valuation through a separate $300 million equity raise. The materialisation of this may depend on Musk’s current political entanglements.

The backdrop to all this is a public clash between Musk and Donald Trump. What began as a difference of opinion over government contracts escalated into a volatile exchange. Musk ultimately declared: “Trump should be impeached.”

This fallout has introduced complications for Morgan Stanley’s fundraising efforts. Some investors are reportedly wary of potential political backlash, especially considering Trump’s history of targeting institutions and individuals who challenge him. 

At this stage, it’s undefined how much the conflict has affected xAI’s debt sale, though signs of market nervousness are evident. For instance, the price of a loan tied to X, another Musk-owned company, reportedly dropped by 1.25 points on the same day Musk’s comments were made public.

Efforts are reportedly underway to defuse the stress. According to Politico, the White House has scheduled a private call between Musk and Trump in a bid to ease hostilities.

While investor interest in generative AI remains high, the financial model for many startups is still viewed as a long-term bet. Most require massive upfront capital to build data infrastructure and hire elite AI talent. xAI is no exception. 

Neither Morgan Stanley nor xAI have issued formal comments regarding the funding round or the political situation as of the time of filing this report.

The funding, led by Thrive Capital, will help OpenAI strengthen its cutting-edge AI research and bolster its computing infrastructure, as the company continues to build AI tools designed to solve complex global problems. 

Previous funding rounds were seen as insufficient capital which couldn’t sustain the company’s lofty mission. However, this fresh influx of funds aims to address those issues, backing OpenAI’s ability to maintain its pace of innovation.

Alongside Thrive Capital’s lead investment, the funding round saw participation from industry giants like Microsoft, Nvidia, and SoftBank, among others. 

Microsoft, which has been a long-time partner of OpenAI, committed close to $1 billion. Nvidia contributed $100 million, while SoftBank made a pledge of $500 million.

The newly raised funds will be used to expand OpenAI’s research into frontier AI and increase its computational resources, addressing one of the main challenges in AI development – access to massive amounts of processing power. 

The company has previously invested billions into AI model training and operational costs, with CEO Sam Altman stating that their GPT-4 model alone cost over $100 million to develop.

As it stands, OpenAI has more than 250 million users worldwide utilising ChatGPT for a wide range of purposes, from boosting creativity to improving business productivity. The company’s AI models have been incorporated into various products and services, with Microsoft integrating them into its suite of productivity tools and Apple leveraging ChatGPT within its AI ecosystem. 

OpenAI’s revenue is also expected to soar, with projections signifying it could reach $100 billion by 2029. Currently, ChatGPT generates huge income, with annual revenue estimated at $2.7 billion, according to recent reports. 

Despite its dominant market position, OpenAI is not without its challenges. Competition is fierce, with companies like Anthropic, xAI, and Cohere emerging as rivals. OpenAI is also facing pressures to increase its prices for services like ChatGPT Plus, which could see its monthly fee rise to $44 by 2029. 

Again, the company’s governance structure has come under review, with Altman noting possible changes in its nonprofit status to attract more investment. Investors in this round reportedly have the option to withdraw their funds if OpenAI does not make this transition within the next two years.

OpenAI’s focus remains on making AI a universally accessible resource. The company is open to working with governments and partners across the globe to maximise the potential of AI while ensuring it benefits society at large. 

However, internal changes are also underway, with several key executives, including Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati and co-founder Ilya Sutskever, having recently departed from the company.