“If you think Nvidia’s shares are expensive, take a look at how much investors are shelling out for a stake in the private companies at the heart of the AI frenzy. Sometimes it seems there’s a unicorn born every minute. ChatGPT maker OpenAI completed a deal yesterday to raise $6.6bn from investors including Thrive Capital and partner Microsoft at a valuation of $157bn. Given that it is reportedly on course to generate around $4bn in annual revenue, that values it at a multiple of almost 40 times gross sales. Meanwhile Amazon and Alphabet-backed Anthropic, which splintered off OpenAI in 2021, is kicking the tires on a further fundraising round that would value it at as much as $40bn, twice as much as in its last round about six months ago, according to The Information. That is 50 times the most generous estimate of its annualized gross revenue projection of $800m, given its revenue-sharing agreement for its Claude chatbot with Amazon. Other recent eye-popping valuations include Elon Musk’s 18-month-old xAI, valued at $24bn in May; France’s Mistral, valued at $6bn in June little more than a year after it was founded; and former OpenAI star scientist Ilya Sutskever’s three-month-old Safe SuperIntelligence, valued at $5bn earlier this month.” Læs hele analysen her.
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