March 2026 AI Financing Report

March captured record capital formation alongside expanding government adoption and a faster infrastructure buildout, while competitive pressure broadened materially across labs and platforms. OpenAI closed a record $120B+ financing and then shelved its Sora app while ending its Disney licensing deal to refocus on coding tools, enterprise adoption, and a broader ChatGPT-led “super app.” It agreed to acquire Astral and Promptfoo, explored a ~$10B distribution JV with TPG and Bain, and faced mounting friction as Britannia sued over training data and Microsoft weighed action tied to cloud exclusivity. In the public sector, Anthropic challenged its Pentagon “supply chain risk” label, as Golden Dome momentum rose and the Pentagon moved toward adopting Palantir’s Maven by September 2026.

Financing remained enormous at $148.4B across 188 transactions, dominated by scaled checks in frontier LLMs, defense, and AI infrastructure. OpenAI led with a $122.0B growth round (Amazon, Nvidia, SoftBank, a16z, and others), followed by Anduril’s $4.0B and $2.0B growth rounds for Nebius and Shield AI, plus NSCALE’s $2.0B Series C. Neura Robotics raised $1.1B, and Yann LeCun’s AMI a $1.03B seed. The top ten also included Legora ($550M), Mind Robotics ($500M), and nexthop.ai ($500M), as Meta and Nvidia pushed more vertical integrations. Huang cited $1T+ Blackwell/Rubin demand through 2027 at GTC as well.