The investment follows a SoftBank taking a $1.5 billion stake in OpenAI last year
Japanese conglomerate SoftBank reportedly in discussions to invest between $15 billion and $25 billion in OpenAI, according to a recent report from the Financial Times.
If it goes ahead, the investment will make SoftBank OpenAI’s largest financial backer and would significantly expand the Japanese company’s presence in the AI sector.
“The talks are ongoing and the amount that SoftBank could invest in primary equity into OpenAI is a moving target,” said an anonymous source.
In addition to this potential investment in OpenAI, SoftBank has already committed $15 billion to Stargate, recently announced a joint venture between involving Oracle, OpenAI, and SoftBank.
The Stargate Project is a $500 billion AI infrastructure initiative to build advanced US-based AI data centres. Announced at the White House last week, it aims to invest $500 billion over the next four years to build new AI infrastructure in the US, starting with deploying $100 billion immediately.
SoftBank’s CEO Masayoshi Son is the chairman of the joint venture.
This week, competition in the AI landscape has greatly intensified following the launch of Chinese AI chatbot DeepSeek. It has quickly positioned itself as a strong competitor to the likes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, having seemingly trained a comparative AI model at a fraction of the usual cost. As a result, SoftBank’s share price dropped by 8.3%. Neither SoftBank nor OpenAI have responded to the news. SoftBank in talks to invest $25bn in OpenAI | Total Telecom
