OpenAI Valuation Hits $500B (www.wsj.com)

OpenAI has struck a secondary share deal that values the company at about $500 billion, according to people familiar with the transaction. Investors including SoftBank and UAE-based MGX paid roughly $6.6 billion to buy existing shares from OpenAI employees, finalizing talks that began this summer. The deal is a private liquidity event rather than a primary fundraising round, so it doesn’t inject new capital into OpenAI’s balance sheet but does crystallize a blockbuster price-per-share and gives early employees meaningful cash-out opportunities. The headline valuation matters for the AI/ML community because it signals outsized investor confidence in foundation-model-driven products and the commercial trajectory of generative AI just three years after ChatGPT’s debut. Practically, a half‑trillion-dollar valuation can accelerate hiring, R&D and compute commitments (and thereby shape supply/demand for cloud GPUs), influence partnerships and pricing strategies, and increase pressure on rivals to scale. It also raises governance and regulatory questions around concentration of power, safety oversight, and market froth—especially since this was a secondary sale, not a transparency-producing IPO. For researchers and practitioners, the move likely means more resources for model development and deployment, but also greater commercial and competitive pressures on how AI systems are built, governed and monetized.