SoftBank eyes up to $25 billion investment in OpenAI: Report

SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son has been aggressively expanding the company’s AI investments, spanning energy, chipmaking, and robotics.

SoftBank Group is in talks to invest $25 billion directly in OpenAI, a move that could make the Japanese conglomerate the AI startup’s largest financial backer, the London-based Financial Times reported on January 30.

According to the report, the talks are on and the final investment amount has not been determined. The potential deal comes just days after OpenAI and SoftBank announced Project Stargate —a $500 billion initiative backed by several major US technology firms to expand AI infrastructure in the US. SoftBank is expected to contribute around $15 billion to the project, with OpenAI matching the amount.

The report said SoftBank’s investment in OpenAI could also include its contribution to Stargate. Any investment exceeding $15 billion would position SoftBank as OpenAI’s largest financial backer after Microsoft Corp, which first backed the ChatGPT maker in 2019.

SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son has been aggressively expanding the company’s AI investments, spanning energy, chipmaking, and robotics. The company already has significant exposure to the AI sector through its ownership of British chip designer Arm Holdings and had previously hinted at developing its own generative AI technology.

The report comes at a time when release of low-cost DeepSeek R1, a Chinese AI model, has raised questions about the necessity of large-scale AI infrastructure investments. DeepSeek claims to rival OpenAI’s GPT-4 in performance while using older hardware and a significantly smaller budget. Its emergence has kicked up a storm and roiled big tech names, pounding their stocks. SoftBank has lost nearly 12 percent of its market capitalisation over the past three days.