WSJ News Exclusive | ChatGPT Creator Is in Talks for Tender Offer That Would Value It at $29 Billion

The new deal would roughly double OpenAI’s valuation from a prior tender offer completed in 2021, when OpenAI was valued at about $14 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported. OpenAI has generated tens of millions of dollars in revenue, in part from selling its AI software to developers, but some investors have expressed skepticism that the company can generate meaningful revenue from the technology.

No final deal has been reached and terms could change, the people said. OpenAI didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

OpenAI released a series of artificial intelligence-based products last year that captured the public’s attention, including the image-generation program Dall-E 2 and chatbot ChatGPT. If the tender goes through at that valuation, OpenAI would be one of the few startups able to raise money at higher valuations in the private market, where investors have pulled back from new deals given last year’s technology rout.

Microsoft Corp. has also been in advanced talks to increase its investment in OpenAI, the Journal reported. In 2019, Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI and became its preferred partner for commercializing new technologies for services like search engine Bing and design app Microsoft Design.

Write to Berber Jin at [email protected] and Miles Kruppa at [email protected]