SoftBank Sells Everything To Fulfill Its $40 Billion Commitment

SoftBank Group is going all-out to fund its $40 billion commitment to OpenAI — liquidating major holdings, issuing debt, and drawing bridge loans in one of the boldest financing maneuvers in its history.

The Japanese conglomerate’s latest move has even shocked many: offloading its entire $5.83 billion Nvidia stake in October, a decision that some deem as Softbank's pivot away from hardware into Artificial intelligence.

The sale marks SoftBank’s second full exit from Nvidia, following a similar divestment in 2019, and comes alongside a $9.17 billion partial sale of its T-Mobile position. Together, these asset monetizations are helping bankroll Masayoshi Son’s grand vision — a multibillion-dollar bet on the future of artificial general intelligence (AGI).

SoftBank’s Chief Financial Officer Yoshimitsu Goto admitted the scale of the OpenAI deal has forced the company to dig deep into its existing portfolio. The group has issued $4.1 billion in yen-denominated bonds, raised $4.2 billion in foreign debt, and secured bridge loans totaling $15 billion — split between OpenAI and ABB Robotics — to keep its capital strategy intact.

“As SoftBank’s investment in OpenAI was very large, the company had to use its existing assets to finance new investments.”

But the timing has raised eyebrows. The financing spree coincides with growing skepticism on Wall Street about the sustainability of AI infrastructure spending. Adding fuel to the controversy, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently came under fire after publicly denying that the company sought U.S. government loan guarantees — despite evidence showing a formal request sent to the White House just days earlier.

Riding OpenAI’s Wave of Value Creation

SoftBank’s aggressive commitment is not without rationale. Its Vision Fund just posted a record quarterly investment gain of $23.4 billion, with $14.3 billion of that windfall coming directly from revaluing its OpenAI stake to a pre-money valuation of $260 billion.

That paper profit effectively doubled SoftBank’s net income year-over-year, demonstrating just how central OpenAI has become to Softbank's investment narrative. For the firm, OpenAI isn’t just another portfolio company — it’s the cornerstone of its renewed AI empire.

The question now is whether this newfound confidence is sustainable. While OpenAI’s value has skyrocketed on the back of global AI adoption, the company is also burning through massive capital to sustain its infrastructure and product development pipeline.

SoftBank’s divestment from Nvidia — the world’s top AI chipmaker — is both symbolic and strategic. The group is abandoning silicon-based growth for software-based intelligence, effectively wagering that OpenAI’s algorithms will generate more future value than Nvidia’s chips.

However, the move is not without risk. The AI sector remains volatile, with Nvidia’s main supplier, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., already showing signs of slowing growth. Meanwhile, short sellers like Michael Burry’s Scion Asset Management have placed bearish bets on Nvidia, even as Big Tech collectively prepares to spend over $400 billion on AI infrastructure next year.

From a market standpoint, the strategy may look visionary — or reckless.

Visionary Gamble or High-Stakes Overreach?

SoftBank’s pivot represents a defining moment for Masayoshi Son’s decades-long pursuit of artificial superintelligence. By liquidating blue-chip assets and stacking leverage to fund OpenAI, Son is effectively betting that the future of wealth creation will lie not in hardware or connectivity, but in synthetic cognition itself.

Yet this ambition carries echoes of SoftBank’s past — where bold vision sometimes collided with overextension. The WeWork saga looms large as a reminder of how rapid valuations can unravel when optimism outruns execution.

If OpenAI maintains its momentum and commercializes its breakthroughs efficiently, SoftBank could emerge as the world’s most influential AI investor — a kingmaker of the next technological epoch. But if growth stalls, this $40 billion moonshot could become one of the most expensive lessons in the history of tech investing.