Masayoshi Son is back at the game he knows best: the highest stakes game. After a period of relative quiet and licking his wounds after Vision Fund’s turbulence, the SoftBank leader is once again reaching out for aggressive debt financing to fund his most ambitious project yet – domination of the OpenAI ecosystem.
According to reports from Bloomberg, the Japanese conglomerate is in advanced talks to raise a bridge loan of up to $40 billion. Major financial institutions, led by JPMorgan, are involved in the process. The facility, with a planned 12-month maturity, is expected to serve as capital fuel for further expansion in the artificial intelligence sector. While the terms of the financing may yet change, the move itself signals Son’s return to the ‘all in’ strategy that defined Silicon Valley’s investment landscape years ago.
The centre of gravity for SoftBank has become OpenAI. The Japanese company, which at the end of last year controlled around 11% of the ChatGPT developer, is set to play a key role in the upcoming giant funding round. With a total of $110 billion, SoftBank is expected to put $30 billion on the table, lining up with giants such as Nvidia and Amazon. This concentration of capital, with OpenAI’s valuation reaching $840 billion, suggests that Son sees Sam Altman’s company as an entity of scale comparable to the world’s largest technology corporations.
However, the question of the time horizon is moot. The short-term nature of the bridge loan points to preparations for a specific liquidity event. OpenAI is already laying the groundwork for an IPO, with optimists indicating that an IPO could value the company at up to a trillion dollars. The debt financing allows SoftBank to maximise its share of this potential growth without immediately committing its own cash reserves.
In this strategic jigsaw, SoftBank ceases to be just a venture capital fund and becomes a key architect of AI infrastructure. If Son’s bet succeeds, SoftBank will secure its position as the most important external shareholder in a company that is defining a new technological era. However, if OpenAI’s valuation does not live up to market expectations, the burden of the 40-billion-dollar debt could become a major operational challenge for the Japanese giant. At this point, however, Masayoshi Son seems convinced that second place does not exist in the race for artificial intelligence.
