OpenAI nears $100B raise at $850B+ valuation

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Rebecca Bellan techcrunch.com

OpenAI's ChatGPT in India techcrunch.com

India flag with 'AI' displayed on smartphone screen in foreground techcrunch.com

OpenAI ChatGPT website displayed on a laptop screen is seen in this illustration photo. techcrunch.com

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OpenAI is reportedly nearing a funding round north of $100 billion at a valuation that could exceed $850 billion, according to TechCrunch citing Bloomberg sources. The cast of investors reads like a partial inventory of modern industrial policy—except it’s private: Amazon (discussed as up to $50 billion), SoftBank (around $30 billion), Nvidia (near $20 billion), and Microsoft, with venture firms and sovereign wealth funds expected to follow.

This is not merely “AI hype.” It is the consolidation of an upstream utility layer—general-purpose language models—into something closer to infrastructure than a product. The company is burning cash “as it inches toward profitability,” TechCrunch notes, and has reportedly begun testing ads in ChatGPT for free users. The most politically sensitive interface on the internet is drifting toward the same business model that made social media a behavioral laboratory: surveillance-adjacent monetization plus algorithmic persuasion, now wrapped around a tool marketed as neutral intelligence.

Even more revealing than the valuation is where OpenAI is embedding itself. TechCrunch reports OpenAI is partnering with Reliance to add AI-powered conversational search to JioHotstar, the Indian conglomerate’s streaming platform. Users will search movies and live sports via text and voice prompts in multiple languages, receiving recommendations based on preferences and viewing history. The integration is two-way: JioHotstar recommendations will surface inside ChatGPT, with deep links into the service.

That matters because Reliance is not just a content distributor. It is a vertically integrated political-economic organism: telecom pipes (Jio), consumer platforms, data centers, and now an AI layer provided by a U.S. firm financed by the usual cloud-and-chip oligopoly. OpenAI says India already has more than 100 million weekly ChatGPT users and plans offices in Mumbai and Bengaluru. Call it “market expansion” if you like; it also looks like dependency engineering at national scale.

This is how a private planning stack gets built. Capital pools fund compute; compute buys model capability; capability is bundled into distribution chokepoints; chokepoints become defaults; defaults become policy facts. Regulation then arrives late, pretending it is shaping the outcome, while in practice it ratifies the structure that already won.

The objection is not that large models exist. It is that the world is being nudged into a single-vendor upstream service—one that can be rate-limited, censored, geopolitically throttled, or quietly “aligned” by a boardroom and a handful of partner governments. If AI becomes the interface to information and commerce, the question is no longer who owns the app. It is who gets to turn the upstream off.

Zero Hedge’s write-up of the same Bloomberg-sourced round adds little beyond amplification, but the direction is clear: OpenAI is being priced not as a company, but as an indispensable layer. Indispensable layers have a habit of becoming political.