Saudi Aramco Bets $800 Million That Open Source Beats Closed AI

Together AI has raised an $800 million Series C at an $8.3 billion post‑money valuation, a financing led by Aramco Ventures through Prosperity7 Ventures US with participation from Nvidia, Vista Equity Partners, General Catalyst, Emergence Capital, March Capital, Pegatron and SentinelOne’s S Ventures. The round, announced July 1, brings Together AI’s total funding to roughly $1.3 billion and follows a $305 million Series B that valued the company at $3.3 billion in February 2025.

"Intelligence becoming as essential to the economy as electricity, bandwidth or capital," said Vipul Ved Prakash, Together AI’s co‑founder and chief executive, framing the raise around the company’s push to make open‑weight models practical for enterprise customers.

Why investors backed open models

Investors are wagering that enterprises will pay for infrastructure that makes open models usable at scale rather than lock into closed proprietary models. Together AI runs training and inference infrastructure for open‑weight models including DeepSeek, Nemotron, MiniMax and Kimi, and the company says usage of open models on its platform has tripled over the past year. Annual bookings now exceed $1 billion, the company reports.

“AI infrastructure over the next decade would be the biggest infrastructure project in human history,” said Abhishek Shukla of Prosperity7 in the Business Wire release, positioning the investment as a capacity play for compute, data centers and power rather than a marketing gesture from an oil industry investor.

Details and risks

• Together AI plans to scale its infrastructure roughly 50 times over the next five years — a target that will require major capital outlays for GPUs, data center space, networking gear and power contracts.
• Nvidia’s participation is notable because it is both supplier and investor; the chipmaker benefits from demand for compute regardless of whether customers choose closed frontier models or open‑weight alternatives running on Together’s platform.
• Despite strong bookings, the company faces margin pressure: bookings are not profit, inference prices continue to fall, and the expansion places Together in capital competition with hyperscalers, specialist clouds and AI labs.

The financing more than doubles Together AI’s valuation in 17 months and signals a shift in enterprise procurement: price, control and the ability to avoid vendor lock‑in are increasingly important considerations for buyers. If open‑weight models can deliver acceptable performance for customer support, internal search, coding agents and document processing, enterprises have a clear incentive to adopt a lower‑cost stack.

Outlook: the $800 million round positions Together AI at the nexus of open models and high‑performance compute, turning the open‑model debate into a procurement decision. The company now has capital to push capacity and reliability, but success will hinge on executing a costly scale‑up while preserving margins as inference economics continue to evolve.