OpenAI was valued at $500 billion in a deal that saw current and former employees sell around $6.6 billion worth of shares.

Reuters reports the employees sold shares to a consortium of investors including Thrive Capital, SoftBank, Dragoneer Investment Group, Abu Dhabi's MGX, and T. Rowe Price.

During its last major funding round, back in April, OpenAI was valued at $300bn. At the time, the company raised $40bn from SoftBank, Microsoft, Coatue, Altimeter, and Thrive.

OpenAI has yet to turn a profit, burning billions on an aggressive hiring spree, acquisitions, hardware plans, and a vast compute spend.

Key is an Oracle cloud contract that is expected to be as much as $300 billion over five years.

The company is also using Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, and has committed to spend as much as $22.4 billion on CoreWeave services. Alongside this, OpenAI is reportedly considering spending as much as $100 billion on backup cloud servers.

In late September, OpenAI also signed a letter of intent to deploy "at least" 10GW of AI data centers with Nvidia hardware, backed by as much as $100 billion from Nvidia.

Much of this compute is managed through the Stargate joint venture, launched earlier this year with a $500 billion spending target, and backed by Oracle, MGX, and SoftBank.