Here’s what’s different in the January 2024 statement

Published

1 day ago

January 29, 2025

This is a comparison of Wednesday’s Federal Open Market Committee statement with the one issued after the Fed’s previous policymaking meeting in December.

Text removed from the December statement is in red with a horizontal line through the middle.

Text appearing for the first time in the new statement is in red and underlined.

Black text appears in both statements.

Watch here for Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s press conference.

OpenAI in talks to raise up to $40 billion at $340 billion valuation

Published

1 hour ago

January 30, 2025

Business Finance News

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks next to SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son after U.S. President Donald Trump delivered remarks on AI infrastructure at the Roosevelt Room in the White House in Washington on Jan. 21, 2025.

Carlos Barria | Reuters

OpenAI is in talks to raise up to $40 billion in a funding round that would lift the artificial intelligence company’s valuation to as high as $340 billion, CNBC has confirmed.

Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank would lead the round, contributing between $15 billion and 25 billion, according to two people familiar with the negotiations who asked not to be named because the talks are ongoing. SoftBank would surpass Microsoft as OpenAI’s top backer.

The Wall Street Journal was first to report on the talks.

Part of the funding may be used for OpenAI’s commitment to Stargate, a joint venture between SoftBank, OpenAI and Oracle that was introduced by President Donald Trump last week, the sources said. The plan calls for billions of dollars to be invested in U.S. AI infrastructure.

OpenAI was last valued at $157 billion by private investors. In late 2022, the company launched its ChatGPT chatbot and kicked off the boom in generative AI. OpenAI closed its latest $6.6 billion round in October, gearing up to aggressively compete with Elon Musk’s xAI, as well as Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Anthropic.

Meanwhile, Chinese startup lab DeepSeek is blowing up in the U.S, presenting fresh competition to OpenAI. DeepSeek saw its app soar to the top of Apple’s App Store rankings this week and roiled U.S. markets on reports that its powerful model was trained at a fraction of the cost of U.S. competitors.

At an event in Washington, D.C., on Thursday hosted by OpenAI, CEO Sam Altman said DeepSeek is “clearly a great model.”

“This is a reminder of the level of competition and the need for democratic Al to win,” he said. He said it also points to the “level of interest in reasoning, the level of interest in open source.”