OpenAI has recently concluded a secondary sale that valued it at $500 million, multiple publications reported today, making it the highest-valued privately held company ever.

CNBC cited sources as saying that the ChatGPT developer first approached current and former employees about the deal early last month. Originally, OpenAI planned to make $10.3 billion shares available to investors through the transaction. The participants sold only about $6.6 billion in stock, which OpenAI staffers reportedly interpret as a “sign of employee confidence.”

The transaction was open to current and former staffers who had held OpenAI shares for at least two years. The investor consortium that bought the stock reportedly included T. Rowe Price, Dragoneer Investment Group and Thrive Capital. The latter firm backed a $6.5 billion equity investment in OpenAI last September.

The ChatGPT developer’s newly closed secondary sale apparently also included contributions from SoftBank Group Corp. and Abu Dhabi’s MGX. Both companies are backing OpenAI’s Stargate initiative, a $500 billion push to build a network of artificial intelligence data centers in the U.S. The facilities’ combined compute capacity is expected to exceed 10 gigawatts.

OpenAI is also building AI infrastructure internationally as part of a program called OpenAI for Countries. Since May, the AI provider has announced plans to open data centers in Norway, the United Arab Emirates and the U.K. On Wednesday, OpenAI revealed that it will also explore data center projects in Korea.

The potential infrastructure investment was announced alongside partnerships with Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co. and SK hynix Inc., the world’s two largest suppliers of memory chips. OpenAI plans to purchase up to 900,000 wafers per month, which reportedly represents about 40% of the world’s supply.

It’s believed that OpenAI plans to spend $350 billion on server rentals through 2030. That could make it difficult for the AI provider to become profitable in the near to mid term. The fact that the recently closed secondary sale valued OpenAI at $500 billion, a $200 billion increase over its March valuation, suggests investors are confident in its ability to manage its increasing costs.

The AI provider’s rapidly improving top line likely also factored into the valuation bump. OpenAI reportedly generated $4.3 billion in sales during the first half of the year, which more than its entire 2024 revenue.

Secondary sales don’t provide the companies that organize them with new capital. However, the valuation increase the transaction delivered could still provide financial benefits for OpenAI. Notably, the deal may make it easier for OpenAI to ink more all-stock acquisitions. The greater the value of a company’s shares, the fewer of them it must issue to finance acquisitions.

OpenAI bought software maker Statsig Inc. last month in a $1.1 billion all-stock transaction. The company built a cloud platform for managing application development projects. Earlier, OpenAI paid $6.5 billion worth of shares to acquire io Products Inc., a consumer electronics startup led by former Apple Inc. Chief Design Officer Jony Ive.

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