Apple Drops Out of Talks to Join OpenAI Investment Round: Report

Tech giant Apple has backed out of talks to invest in an OpenAI funding round, valued at about $6.5 billion, the Wall Street Journal said on Friday.

The newspaper cited a person familiar with the matter saying the company had recently fallen out of the talks, which are set to close next week.

According to the report, other firms like Microsoft and Nvidia are also in talks to participate in the investment. However, Microsoft was supposed to invest an amount of about $1 billion or roughly Rs. 8,379 crore since it had already injected $13 billion or approximately Rs. 1,08,928 crore into the company.

OpenAI remained silent on the matter. Apple didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.

Last month, the Journal first reported that Apple was in talks, as part of OpenAI’s new fund-raising effort that could value the maker of ChatGPT above $100 billion, or roughly Rs. 8,37,996 crore.

In fact, high valuation was the result of the AI arms race OpenAI created with the launch of ChatGPT in the latter part of 2022 as it made the varying companies across industries get into the race where they invested billions of dollars into the technology to not stay behind competition and for sure, get its market share.