SoftBank Seeks $40B Loan for OpenAI Stake
SoftBank is trying to secure a massive $40 billion loan to fund a $30 billion investment in OpenAI. The move is founder Masayoshi Son's biggest bet yet on AI, aiming to position SoftBank as a central infrastructure provider by gaining privileged access to OpenAI's foundation models for robotics and edge devices.
This move is a core component of Masayoshi Son's "Physical AI" strategy, which aims to fuse advanced AI with robotics. The OpenAI investment follows SoftBank's recent $5.4 billion deal to acquire ABB Robotics, a major player in industrial automation, signaling a clear intent to control both the intelligence layer and the physical hardware. The scale of this bet has prompted credit ratings agency S&P Global to lower SoftBank's outlook to 'negative', citing potential pressure on the firm's liquidity. Upon completion, OpenAI could represent 30% of SoftBank's total investment assets, a share equal to its massive stake in chip designer Arm. To finance its AI ambitions, SoftBank has been divesting other holdings, including its entire stake in Nvidia. SoftBank's $30 billion is part of a historic $110 billion funding round for OpenAI, which set the company's valuation at a staggering $840 billion. The round, the largest private financing deal ever, also includes a $50 billion investment from Amazon and $30 billion from Nvidia, underscoring the massive capital required to build and scale frontier AI models. The strategic focus on "foundation models for robotics" points to the industry's shift from pure Large Language Models (LLMs) to Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. These VLA models enable robots to translate natural language commands into physical actions by interpreting visual and sensory data, allowing them to perform complex, multi-step tasks in the real world. This investment is also tied to the larger "Stargate Project
