Welcome to the TechMean right home for Tuesday, April 1st, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough today.

Masasan came through for OpenAI, a $40 billion round at a $300 billion post-money valuation.

Sam Altman says OpenAI is going back to Open Waits, a new encryption model for Gmail, a new movie strategy for

Amazon, and why the Switch 2 represents a new revenue strategy for Nintendo. Here's what you miss

today in the world of tech.

OpenAI has closed a new $40 billion round, the most ever raised by a private tech company

at a $300 billion post-money valuation. SoftBank led the round with $30 billion, but according

to a source, around $18 billion of that is for Stargate, quoting CNBC. Open AI said it

plans to use the fresh capital to push the frontiers

of AI research even further and scale its compute infrastructure according to a blog post.

About $18 billion of the funding is expected to be used for Open AI's commitment to Stargate,

according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke anonymously due to the confidential

nature of the terms of the deal.

The joint venture between SoftBank, Open AI, and Oracle was announced by President Donald Trump in

January. The initial funding will be $10 billion, followed by the remaining $30 billion,

by the end of 2025, the person said. But the round comes with a caveat. Softbank said in an updated disclosure on Monday

that its total investment could be slashed to as low as $20 billion if OpenAI doesn't restructure

into a for-profit entity by December 31st. The provision ramps up pressure on OpenAI to pull off

the for-profit conversion, a plan that will need the blessing of Microsoft and the

California Attorney General, and has been challenged in court by Elon Musk, who was one of the

co-founders of Open AI in 2015 when it started as a non-profit research lab. The largest private

deal before Open AI's round was Ant Group's $14 billion capital raise in 2018. After that was

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