OpenAI – the pioneering artificial intelligence company known for introducing the world to the conversational tool ChatGPT – has reportedly seen its valuation surge to $500 billion, according to sources with Reuters. This figure was achieved following a transaction in which a group of current and former employees sold about $6.6 billion worth of their company shares.
According to Reuters’ sources, this latest valuation represents a substantial increase from its previous standing of $300 billion, serving as a powerful testament to the company’s rapid growth in both its user base and generated revenue over a short period.
The rise in the company’s market worth underscores the intense investment enthusiasm surrounding the leaders of generative artificial intelligence, a technology widely expected to transform industries and economies globally.
OpenAI, under the leadership of CEO Sam Altman, is at the forefront of this global push —a movement that includes other major players, such as Nvidia — and is predicated on the vast and costly undertaking of building extensive data centers and developing sophisticated AI services. Although the US startup has not yet achieved profitability, its commercial momentum is already driving an infrastructure boom, as evidenced by massive agreements signed with technology giants such as Oracle and the memory chip producer SK Hynix.
ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chatbot that generates dialogue by employing deep learning algorithms. It is trained on a massive dataset of text and code, enabling it to understand the patterns, grammar, and context of human language. This training allows it to process and analyze inquiries, producing coherent, relevant, and human-like responses in conversation.
The real power of ChatGPT lies in its versatility and broad range of applications. It transcends a simple question-and-answer tool by engaging in continuous, contextual conversations, remembering previous turns in a chat, and adapting its tone and focus. Users are utilizing it for a wide variety of tasks, including generating detailed content such as articles, essays, and creative writing like poems and stories.
It has also become an invaluable tool for software developers, assisting in writing code, debugging errors, and explaining the functionality of existing scripts. For the everyday user, it acts as a powerful assistant capable of solving mathematical problems, translating languages, summarizing lengthy documents, brainstorming ideas, and creating detailed plans, from travel itineraries to business strategies. Plus, its evolving capabilities now include multimodal functionality, enabling it to process and analyze image and voice inputs, making it an ever more sophisticated tool for everything from data analysis of spreadsheets to generating unique visuals from text prompts.
As part of the recent share transaction, the employee shares were acquired by a consortium of investors. The group reportedly includes prominent names like Thrive Capital, SoftBank, Dragoneer Investment Group, Abu Dhabi’s MGX, and T. Rowe Price.
The source familiar with the deal also indicated that the company had authorized the sale of more than $10 billion worth of stock on the secondary market. This latest share sale further builds on SoftBank’s existing investment, which originated in OpenAI’s $40 billion primary funding round. The company has reportedly generated approximately $4.3 billion in revenue in the first half of 2025 alone, a figure that is reportedly sixteen percent higher than its total revenue for the entire previous year.
The timing of this remarkable financial achievement is significant, as it occurs during a period of intense rivalry for top talent in the artificial intelligence sector. Tech giants are aggressively competing, offering highly lucrative compensation packages to secure the best minds. A notable example is Meta, which is investing billions in the AI domain and has successfully recruited Alexandr Wang, a prominent figure in the industry, to lead its new super intelligence unit.
This latest private share sale not only provides substantial liquidity to long-term employees, which is a key strategy for talent retention, but also cements OpenAI’s position as the world’s most valuable privately held company, now surpassing the previous valuation held by Elon Musk’s space exploration company, SpaceX, which stands at $456 billion.
The use of secondary sales, a strategy also employed by other high-profile startups like Stripe and Databricks, enables employees to monetize their equity without the company needing to undertake an immediate IPO.
