SoftBank Group said it completed a $41 ‍billion investment ‍in OpenAI, one of the largest-ever private funding rounds that would ​give the Japanese firm a stake of about 11% in the ChatGPT maker.

SoftBank Chief ⁠Executive Masayoshi Son has made an "all in" bet on OpenAI and is expanding ⁠investment in artificial intelligence ‌and related infrastructure, hoping to capitalize on surging demand for the computing capacity that underpins AI applications.

The completion of the latest ⁠funding round for OpenAI comes just days after SoftBank unveiled a deal to buy digital infrastructure investor DigitalBridge Group in a deal valued at $4 billion.

On Wednesday, SoftBank said it completed an additional $22.5 billion investment in OpenAI after ⁠putting in $7.5 billion in April. OpenAI ​also received an upsized syndicated co-investment from other backers worth $11 billion, SoftBank added.

In March, SoftBank agreed to ‍invest up to $40 billion into a for-profit subsidiary of OpenAI, with the funding structured as a ​combination of direct capital and syndicated co-investment from other backers.

The deal valued OpenAI at around $300 billion on a post-money basis, but a later secondary stock sale completed in October, valued the company at around $500 billion, according to Pitchbook data.

CNBC first reported the news earlier in the day.

AI has become the central axis of global technology markets this year, driving a surge of investment by the world's largest companies and reshaping investor expectations.

OpenAI has emerged as a central pillar ⁠of that industry-wide AI spending push.

The ChatGPT maker ‌along with Oracle and other stakeholders has planned a project dubbed "Stargate", a vast, multi-year data-center initiative aimed at supporting next-generation AI models, with backing from major ‌investors including SoftBank.

(Reporting ⁠by Akash Sriram and Surbhi Misra in Bengaluru and Krystal Hu in San Francisco; ⁠Editing by Krishna Chandra Eluri, Miyoung Kim and Thomas Derpinghaus)