SoftBank to Maintain Focus on OpenAI, Report Says
SoftBank CFO Yoshimitsu Goto told Nikkei Asia the group aims to become OpenAI’s largest shareholder and will not back rival model developers.
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SoftBank Group will raise its investment in OpenAI to roughly $34.7 billion by the end of 2025, Chief Financial Officer Yoshimitsu Goto told Nikkei Asia on Thursday, adding that the company does not intend to back other foundation-model developers despite increasing rivalry in the sector.
Goto said the planned increase would make SoftBank the largest single shareholder in OpenAI, with a stake of around 11%, and reflects Masayoshi Son’s long-running effort to align the group with the US lab’s research trajectory and its ambition in artificial superintelligence.
He also indicated that SoftBank is examining financing structures that would allow it to raise capital against OpenAI equity, similar to an earlier transaction that used Arm shares as collateral before the chip-design unit’s listing.
Responding to concerns that global investment in AI resembles a speculative bubble, Goto said it was too early to reach that conclusion given the pace of technological change and differing views among investors.
SoftBank has identified semiconductors, data centers, robotics and power as priority investment areas tied to model training and compute, and has previously discussed building data-centre capacity to serve OpenAI’s infrastructure needs.
Despite the emergence of new high-performance models from rival labs, Goto said SoftBank remains convinced that OpenAI maintains a lead, citing its scale, adoption and depth of research.
