OpenAI said on Wednesday that it had completed a $6.6 billion fund-raising deal that nearly doubles the high-profile company’s valuation from just nine months ago.

The new fund-raising round, led by the investment firm Thrive Capital, values OpenAI at $157 billion, according to two people with knowledge of the deal. Microsoft, the chipmaker Nvidia, the tech conglomerate SoftBank, the United Arab Emirates investment firm MGX and others are also putting money into OpenAI.

The company started the A.I. boom in 2022 with the release of its online chatbot, ChatGPT, sparking a race to invest in start-ups that develop similar technology. And its latest investment round indicates that the tech industry’s excitement over artificial intelligence remains strong, despite concerns about the effectiveness and the safety of the technology.

That should offer relief to other A.I. start-ups. While the tech industry’s biggest companies have been pouring billions of dollars into A.I. projects, investments in start-ups working on the technology cooled this year.

One reason for the slowdown was concern that small companies could not compete with the likes of Google, Amazon and Microsoft, and a number of start-ups were essentially swallowed by the tech giants.

But OpenAI’s profile has given it a major head start, and its revenues are rising quickly. The start-up expects about $3.7 billion in sales this year, according to financial documents reviewed by The New York Times. The company now has about 1,700 employees, after adding more than 1,000 in the last nine months.

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