Descriptions:
Bloomberg Technology reported on February 19, 2026 that OpenAI is close to finalizing the first phase of a new funding round expected to exceed $100 billion, potentially pushing its post-money valuation to $850 billion from a pre-money figure of approximately $730 billion. The initial tranche centers on strategic investors: Amazon is reportedly in discussions to contribute up to $50 billion — its first investment in OpenAI at this scale — SoftBank up to $30 billion, with Microsoft and NVIDIA also participating. The Amazon deal includes an expansion of OpenAI’s cloud computing partnership with AWS. Closing of the strategic phase was reported to be possible before the end of February 2026, with venture and financial investors to follow in a second phase.
The broadcast also covered OpenAI’s newly announced partnership with Tata Group and Tata Consultancy Services, revealed during CEO Sam Altman’s appearance at the India AI Summit in New Delhi, to build agentic enterprise solutions for specific industries and potentially scale a datacenter from megawatt to gigawatt capacity.
Separately, Bloomberg reported that ByteDance is actively hiring nearly 100 AI roles across California and Washington — spanning LLM data production, humanlike AI research, and science models targeting drug discovery in biology, chemistry, and physics. Analysts noted this hiring push, combined with ByteDance’s recent launches of competitive video and image generation models, signals the company’s ambitions extend well beyond its TikTok social media identity, raising fresh national security questions about Chinese AI expansion on American soil.
📺 Source: Bloomberg Technology · Published February 19, 2026
🏷️ Format: News Analysis
