OpenAI has the largest private tech fundraising round on record. Rival Anthropic now has the second.
Anthropic announced on Thursday the close of a $30 billion funding round at a $380 billion post-money valuation, more than double what the artificial intelligence company was worth in September, when it last raised money.
The company behind Claude is trying to keep pace with OpenAI, which last year closed a round of more than $40 billion led by SoftBank. The largest private deal before that was Ant Group’s $14 billion capital raise in 2018.
Developing and training AI models is extremely expensive, which is a big reason why Anthropic and OpenAI continue raising such large sums, as they have to pour money into computing resources like Nvidia’s graphics processing units. They’re also engaged in fierce competition with Google
, which has announced plans to shell out up to $185 billion this year in capital expenditures, and is investing heavily in its Gemini products.
