SoftBank swings to profit on valuation boost from OpenAI bet
As at December, its investment gain on the ChatGPT creator stands at an estimated US$19.8 billion
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[TOKYO] SoftBank Group sprang back to a quarterly profit after chief executive officer Masayoshi Son’s bet on OpenAI paid off in valuation gains. This cemented the Japanese company’s position as an investment proxy for the ChatGPT creator.
The Tokyo-based company has invested more than US$30 billion in OpenAI, accumulating an 11 per cent stake as at December, and has been in talks to invest as much as US$30 billion more in a round that would value the startup at about US$750 billion to US$830 billion.
In the same period, SoftBank’s investment gain on OpenAI stood at an estimated US$19.8 billion, the company said on Thursday (Feb 12).
OpenAI now represents one of SoftBank’s biggest holdings, alongside a roughly 90 per cent stake in chip designer Arm. That has tethered the Japanese company’s shares to ChatGPT’s relative performance, against its rivals Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude.
SoftBank is “the only real way to directly play OpenAI in today’s public markets”, BTIG analyst Jesse Sobelson wrote in a note ahead of Thursday’s earnings. He estimated that the startup represents 30 per cent of SoftBank’s net asset value.
He added that the next OpenAI capital raise could spur the re-mark of SoftBank equity ownership, and serve as a catalyst.
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BTIG said that it expects to receive or seek compensation from SoftBank for investment banking services in the next three months.
For the December quarter, SoftBank reported a net income of 248.6 billion yen (S$2.1 billion) in its fiscal third quarter, against the average analyst estimate of about 857 billion yen.
It was the tech investor’s fourth straight quarterly profit, a first for SoftBank since 2021, and came despite investment losses on share price drops as it is an early investor in South Korean e-commerce giant Coupang.
The company has also stepped up investments in other parts of the artificial intelligence ecosystem, as its founder Son seeks to play a bigger role in shaping future technology.
In January, the company signed a US$3 billion deal to buy private equity firm DigitalBridge Group, whose portfolio includes digital infrastructure companies such as AIMS, AtlasEdge and DataBank.
SoftBank announced the US$500 billion Stargate push, alongside OpenAI, Oracle and Abu Dhabi’s MGX, to build data centres in the US.
It separately pursued a deal of around US$50 billion for data centre operator Switch, but the talks were halted earlier this year.
To finance some of that cost, the company said that it divested more of its T-Mobile US holding, and increased the amount of its margin loan based on its mobile unit SoftBank shares.
It has already unloaded its entire Nvidia stake for US$5.8 billion, and expanded a margin loan using its Arm shares.
S&P Global Ratings warned in January that its accelerating pace of investments, along with the sharp drop in the value of Arm shares at the end of 2025, are heaping pressure on the company’s creditworthiness.
Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Sharon Chen wrote: “SoftBank faces more than US$20 billion of refinancing in 2026, with its bonds trading wide due to supply risk.
“It can manage loan-to-value and raise funds by selling assets, but this would further weaken its portfolio liquidity.” BLOOMBERG
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