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OpenAI said it had completed a long-awaited restructuring, propelling its biggest external shareholder Microsoft to a $4tn market capitalisation.
The ChatGPT creator, which was founded as a non-profit but has been racing to unlock new investment, said a non-profit called the OpenAI Foundation would now hold equity in its for-profit arm.
Microsoft, which first invested $1bn in OpenAI in 2019, said in a blog post that its stake — now roughly 27 per cent — was worth approximately $135bn under the new structure.
The deal sent the Seattle-based group’s shares up by as much as 4 per cent at the start of trading in New York, giving Microsoft a market capitalisation of $4.1tn.
“The close of our recapitalisation gives us the ability to keep pushing the frontier of AI, and an updated corporate structure to ensure progress serves everyone,” OpenAI’s chair Bret Taylor said in a blog post on Tuesday.
OpenAI was founded as a research-focused non-profit in 2015 but since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, has become a commercial juggernaut with 800mn weekly users and has been trying to become a more conventional investor-friendly entity.
The group said the equity held by the OpenAI Foundation was currently valued at approximately $130bn.
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