The proposed investment would be part of a massive funding round that could raise up to $100 billion for OpenAI, valuing the artificial intelligence company at around $830 billion, the report said.
If finalised, the move would further cement SoftBank’s position as one of OpenAI’s most significant backers and underscore Son’s ambition to place the Japanese conglomerate at the centre of the global AI race.
In December, SoftBank said it had completed a $41 billion investment in OpenAI, giving it an 11 per cent stake. Son has repeatedly described his strategy as an “all-in” wager on artificial intelligence, signalling a sharp pivot back to aggressive dealmaking after years of mixed returns at the Vision Fund.
OpenAI, meanwhile, is grappling with soaring costs associated with training and running its increasingly powerful AI models, even as competition intensifies from rivals such as Alphabet’s Google. The need for capital has grown as the company scales infrastructure and seeks to stay ahead in a crowded and fast-moving market.
SoftBank’s shares rose 3.5 per cent in Tokyo morning trade following the report.
Reuters had reported last month that Son had scrambled to line up financing for SoftBank’s earlier OpenAI investment, a push that effectively slowed most other dealmaking at the Vision Fund to a crawl.
Both SoftBank and OpenAI are also investors in Stargate, a $500 billion initiative aimed at building large-scale AI data centres for training and inference. Executives behind the project have said it is critical to the United States’ ambitions to maintain an edge over China in artificial intelligence.
If the new funding round goes through, it would rank among the largest capital raises in corporate history and further highlight the extraordinary sums now flowing into the AI sector as companies race to secure computing power, talent and technological leadership.
