Near-term liquidity of OpenAI is put into question tied to a $30-billion tranche led by SoftBank, framed as a two-week countdown to “virtually no cash left” if the close does not happen.
A snippet of the filing back in November states that SoftBank Group entered an amendment agreement with OpenAI to enable “the full investment of an additional $22.5 billion at the second closing regardless of whether certain conditions were satisfied,” and that the company subsequently elected to make the full investment through SVF2 in December 2025.
On the alternative funding path, reporting says OpenAI is in talks to raise $10 billion or more from Amazon, alongside plans to use AWS Trainium chips and to explore commerce partnership opportunities.
The strategic center is capital-for-compute: OpenAI already announced a $38 billion, seven-year AWS services deal in November, including EC2 UltraServers with hundreds of thousands of chips and scaling to tens of millions of CPUs, with more capacity planned by end of 2026. An equity check plus Trainium adoption would give AWS a flagship silicon customer while helping OpenAI finance massive compute commitments.
Reuters notes Microsoft holds a 27% stake and has an exclusive right to sell OpenAI models to its cloud customers, which can limit how AWS monetizes OpenAI models even if OpenAI runs workloads on AWS. Reuters also reports OpenAI is looking to sell an enterprise version of ChatGPT to Amazon, while saying it is unclear whether any deal includes integrating shopping features Amazon is developing for its own apps.
Information for this story was found via Reuters and the sources and companies mentioned. The author has no securities or affiliations related to the organizations discussed. Not a recommendation to buy or sell. Always do additional research and consult a professional before purchasing a security. The author holds no licenses.
