Following recent days rumours Softbank said it could lead Open AI’s new round with an investment of 25 billion US Dollars.
Japan’s financial herald Nikkei reported that Softbank’s founder Masayoshi Son and Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, are willing to win the support of Japanese companies for the development of datacenters, electric plants and hardware sites in support of AI projects. Son and Altman are also going to meet Shigeru Ishiba, Japan’s Prime Minister, on 3 February, Monday. Nikkei also said that Softbank aims to involve Apollo Global Management and Brookfield in such a deal.
The executives, Rene Haas, ceo of ARM Holdings Plc, and Junichi Miyakawa, head of SoftBank ICT unit, make the panel for Tokyo event “Transforming Business through AI” (see here the live streaming).
Financial Times and CNBC recently reported thatSoftBankcould invest 25 billion US Dollars in a 40 billion round that OpenAI is close to launch on the ground of an enterprise value of 340 billion (see here CNBC).
However, several market participants are questioning the actual funding needs of the AI sector as Chinese scaleup DeepSeek said that 5.6 million was enough for training its software (see here a previous post by BeBeez)
Softbank joined the Stargate Project, an US programme for investing 500 billion in the next four years for developing new AI infrastructures for OpenAI with the support of Oracle and MGX, a sovereign fund of Abu Dhabi with a focus on AI. ARM, Microsoft and NVIDIA are further partners of Stargate (see here a previous post by BeBeez).
SoftBank’s mobile unit, Japan’s third wireless operator, signed an agreement with Microsoft for selling OpenAI services. The ICT company own part of PayPal payment division, messaging app Line and of search engine Yahoo Japan. In October 2024, OpenAI, attracted a 6.6 billion round from Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures (lead investors), Microsoft, Nvidia, Altimeter Capital, Fidelity, SoftBank, and MGX for a post-moneyvalue of 157 billion (see here a previous post by BeBeez).
