PANews reported on January 31 that according to Jinshi, the Wall Street Journal quoted unnamed people familiar with the matter as saying that OpenAI is in early talks for a large round of financing, valuing the company at $340 billion, more than double last October. The ChatGPT maker is discussing up to $40 billion in this round of financing. Earlier reports said that SoftBank Group was considering investing $15 billion to $25 billion in OpenAI. OpenAI and other top artificial intelligence companies have pledged to invest billions of dollars in data, talent, and physical infrastructure to support the development of more advanced artificial intelligence systems. In recent days, the Chinese AI company DeepSeek released a competitive model, which has called this spending boom into question.