(March 6): SoftBank Group Corp is seeking a loan of as much as US$40 billion to mostly help finance its investment in US tech giant OpenAI, according to people familiar with the matter, in what would be its largest-ever borrowing denominated solely in dollars.
The bridge loan would have a tenor of about 12 months, according to some of the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private matters. Four lenders, including JPMorgan Chase & Co, will be underwriting the facility, the people said.
Talks with banks are ongoing and details could change, the people added. Spokespeople for JPMorgan and SoftBank declined to comment.
The potential size of the loan underscores SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son’s aggressive bid to try and position his company as a linchpin in the global AI boom. The US$30 billion bet on OpenAI comes on top of more than US$30 billion the company has already injected into the startup, which now forms the centrepiece of Son’s ambitions — a gamble reminiscent of his early investments in ByteDance Ltd or Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, but at a far higher price.
The Japanese company, which held about 11% in OpenAI at the end of December, has unloaded assets including its stake in Nvidia Corp to bankroll its growing bet on OpenAI.
The US company now represents one of SoftBank’s biggest holdings, alongside a roughly 90% stake in chip designer Arm Holdings Plc, even as investments elsewhere slow. That’s tethered the Japanese company’s shares to ChatGPT’s relative performance against Google’s Gemini and Anthropic PBC’s Claude.
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Still, the scale of SoftBank’s bet — as well as persistent concerns about a bubble given the lack of a truly mainstream use case for AI services — has spooked market observers. This week, S&P lowered SoftBank’s credit outlook, citing the danger that its investments in OpenAI may hurt the Japanese company’s liquidity and the credit quality of its assets.
SoftBank Group’s US$30 billion investment in OpenAI is a further drag to its credit profile, with the company facing limited headroom under S&P’s 35% adjusted LTV threshold. It has been relying on debt and asset sales to fund more than US$70 billion of AI investments since 2025, resulting in a large debt burden and weaker portfolio quality.
An uncertain macro backdrop and concerns around an AI bubble pose risk to SoftBank’s LTV and the timing of an OpenAI listing — a key positive catalyst. SoftBank needs to raise as much as US$40 billion this year. It benefits from strong access to the yen market and can raise more than US$10 billion from the sale of T-Mobile and listed tech stocks, excluding Arm. Its bonds are likely to remain volatile, with supply risk and potential risk-off posing spread widening pressure.
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SoftBank and OpenAI have jointly invested US$1 billion in SB Energy, an infrastructure company working with tech firms on a US buildout of data centres. The company has also agreed to buy private equity firm DigitalBridge Group Inc for about US$3 billion in cash. Last year, it bought US chip designer Ampere Computing LLC for US$6.5 billion and proposed a US$5.4 billion acquisition of ABB Ltd’s robotics unit.
All these investments underscore the need for the tech investor to take on large sums of debt. The company has already increased the amount of its margin loans secured by mobile unit SoftBank Corp and chip unit Arm.
Uploaded by Evelyn Chan
