Nathaniel Whittemore

The Wall Street Journal reports that SoftBank is in talks to invest another crisp $30 billion into OpenAI's next monster fundraising round.

Now, SoftBank is already one of OpenAI's largest shareholders, with a roughly 11% stake after investing $30 billion last year.

That funding seemed to stretch SoftBank's pockets, with the firm selling off Nvidia stock and taking loans against their AMD holdings to make it work.

While rumors have been sparse, reporting from December suggested that OpenAI is targeting $100 billion in fundraising this year.

The valuation is said to be $830 billion, which is another 66% jump from the $500 billion valuation struck in October.

Frankly, it looks like they're well on their way, with separate reports suggesting that Nvidia, Microsoft, and Amazon are looking to participate to the tune of $60 billion between them.

Now, in my 2026 predictions, I debated a bunch, but I ultimately came to the base case that I didn't think that Anthropic or OpenAI would actually go public in 2026, with the reason being that A, public markets are kind of a pain in the butt, and B, I thought that there was just going to be enough funding for them in private markets that they weren't going to be forced to go public.

Now the capital needs are extreme here, and so maybe they just have to take advantage of every option they have, including IPO.

But with OpenAI well on their way to that $100 billion round, they certainly are going to have their options.

Moving over to OpenAI competitor Anthropic, ServiceNow has signed another big AI deal, this time with Anthropic, partnering with the lab along multiple angles.

The multi-year deal includes making Claude the default model across ServiceNow's platform.

Claude will also drive their agent builder, which allows users to create custom workflows and vibe code apps.

In addition, Claude access is being rolled out to all 29,000 ServiceNow employees, including Claude Code for the engineering team.

ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott said in a press release, ServiceNow with Anthropic is turning intelligence into action through AI-native workflows for the world's largest enterprises.

Together, we are proving that deeply integrated platforms with an open ecosystem are how the future is built.

Now, details of the deal weren't released, so we don't know the length or monetary value.

But the deal comes just a week after ServiceNow extended their other big deal with OpenAI, suggesting that they want to make sure that customers have access to AI from both companies.

ServiceNow President Amit Zaveri said, We don't view these partnerships as competitive or mutually exclusive.

Enterprise customers want model choice.

They want the right model for the right job, keeping governance, security, and auditability consistency on the ServiceNow AI platform.