The year 2022 marked the dawn of the “modern AI era” with the launch of ChatGPT, which became the fastest-growing digital service in history. The world was irrevocably transformed as entire industries, economies, and workplace cultures were fundamentally reset by OpenAI's model.
Over more than three years, ChatGPT has evolved beyond a simple AI Q&A app to become the AI infrastructure of the century, propelling OpenAI from a small research organization founded just a few years ago to the highest-valued startup ever, surpassing $500 billion.
As a leader in AI’s booming era, this organization created the GPT family of models, the text-to-image model DALL-E, and the video creation model Sora, revolutionizing technology. Particularly, ChatGPT, a Large Language Model (LLM) launched in November 2022, sparked the major wave of Generative AI in technology history.
OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a "non-profit research laboratory" based in the U.S., funded with $1 billion by Silicon Valley visionaries such as Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and leading investors, along with rising tech entrepreneur Sam Altman at the time.
OpenAI was established with the ambitious goal of developing advanced artificial intelligence—Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)—that is as intelligent or nearly as intelligent as humans, designed to be safe and beneficial to humanity, with a clear mission to operate as a non-profit organization.
However, the development path required massive investment, pressuring OpenAI to overhaul its corporate structure in 2019. It transitioned from a non-profit to a full for-profit entity, securing its first major investment from Microsoft as both investor and strategic partner, which provided Azure resources to develop large-scale models.
In 2019, OpenAI created a limited-profit subsidiary called “OpenAI LP” to accept private investments. This restructuring introduced a hybrid model unprecedented in the industry, retaining the original non-profit entity (OpenAI Inc.) as the parent with ultimate control, governed through a managing entity (OpenAI GP LLC) overseeing the for-profit subsidiary. This subsidiary was structured as a “capped-profit company,” where returns to investors and employee shareholders are limited to a maximum cap. Any profits exceeding this cap are returned to the parent non-profit (OpenAI Inc.) to support its ongoing mission.
At the end of 2022, the launch of ChatGPT became a global phenomenon, reaching its first 1 million users within 5 days—the fastest growth in internet history—and 100 million active users within 2 months. It topped global download charts and became the fastest-growing app worldwide that year. ChatGPT quickly became a global mass technology, driving unprecedented company valuation growth. By early 2023, OpenAI’s valuation surpassed $29 billion after its first employee stock sale.
Just two years later, the company’s valuation was estimated at $300 billion following a major $4 billion funding round led by global investment giant SoftBank in March 2025. A few months later, its valuation soared to $500 billion through a large secondary stock sale, amid unstoppable global AI investment momentum.
During this period, OpenAI further restructured its for-profit segment to enable fundraising and shareholding like a conventional company. It announced it would halt plans to become a fully for-profit company and instead maintain its status as a “Public Benefit Corporation” (PBC), commencing operations in 2024. Under this structure, OpenAI remains overseen by the original non-profit, now rebranded as the “OpenAI Foundation.”
This change is viewed as essential for raising trillions in capital and may lead to an initial public offering (IPO) potentially valued at $1 trillion (approximately 37 trillion baht), opening the way to massive funding for AI infrastructure, which will require many more trillions going forward. If realized, this would rank among the largest IPOs in history.
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The rise to a half-trillion-dollar valuation stems from multiple factors: viral consumer growth, expansion into enterprise markets, rapid and continuous product innovation, and unprecedented funding fueling technology infrastructure development.
OpenAI’s models are deployed across diverse channels, with exclusive partnerships with global tech giants creating a worldwide network effect, making OpenAI's position highly robust. Additionally, OpenAI plays a role in national AI infrastructure development through the Stargate project, aiming to build advanced data centers and proprietary AI chips. Crucially, a clearer commercialization path has emerged via ChatGPT Enterprise, consumer ChatGPT, API services, and serving as infrastructure for Microsoft’s Copilot system.
The result is that OpenAI is now the most trusted company among investors in the AI-first era. Major tech firms and nearly the entire investment community, led by Microsoft, SoftBank, Nvidia, and Thrive Capital, reflect confidence extending beyond the products themselves.
Nonetheless, despite rapid growth, OpenAI faces regulatory pressures worldwide on copyright and user safety issues. Competition from major rivals like Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and xAI accelerates development, especially driven by massive investment flows sustaining the AI industry, which may impact the broader economy in the future.
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Source information Visual Capitalist , Fortune , Financial Times
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