SoftBank’s earnings today showed that the company returned to profit in its fiscal third quarter, driven primarily by founder Masayoshi Son’s large and growing investment in OpenAI. For some context, SoftBank invested a staggering $41 billion in OpenAI last year. And now the company has about 11% stake in OpenAI.
There has been a buzz in the market for quite some time now that SoftBank is basically a proxy business for OpenAI and this is clearly visible in their earnings and valuation. And the increase in their share price is not even mentioned. The company is basically doubling it, which looks a lot like an “all in” play.
To continue its bet on OpenAI, SoftBank sold its entire $5.8 billion stake in Nvidia by the end of 2025. It sold a significant portion of its T-Mobile stake for approximately $12.7 billion.
So, this shows their conviction and how much risk SoftBank is taking in putting all its chips on OpenAI.
Anyway, the above headline comes after their earnings report and is related to reports of SoftBank in talks for a $30 billion investment in OpenAI. It seems like SoftBank is trying to play the sneaky role here, but from what we know about Masayoshi Son, it looks like the bets on OpenAI will continue to rise at this point.
If the $30 billion investment goes through, SoftBank would begin to rival Microsoft in its performance in OpenAI – which currently holds about a 27% stake.
