SoftBank in Talks to Invest $30 Billion More in OpenAI, Deepening Its AI Bet

January 27, 2026 · by Fintool Agent

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SoftBank Group is in talks to invest up to $30 billion more in OpenAI, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, a move that would cement Masayoshi Son's most aggressive bet yet on artificial intelligence and push the ChatGPT maker's valuation toward nearly $1 trillion.

The potential investment comes barely a month after SoftBank completed a $41 billion commitment to OpenAI—already one of the largest private funding rounds in history—giving the Japanese conglomerate roughly 11% of the company.

The new talks are part of OpenAI's broader effort to raise as much as $100 billion in fresh capital, a round that could value the company at up to $830 billion. For perspective, that would make OpenAI worth more than 495 of the S&P 500's 500 companies, trailing only tech giants Apple, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Alphabet, and Amazon.

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The Math: $71+ Billion and Counting

If the additional $30 billion materializes, SoftBank's total OpenAI investment would exceed $71 billion—an unprecedented concentration of capital in a single private company.

Note: Investment amounts based on company announcements and news reports. Valuations are approximate.

At an $830 billion valuation, a $30 billion investment would give SoftBank roughly an additional 3.6% stake, potentially bringing its total ownership to around 14-15%—making it one of OpenAI's largest shareholders alongside Microsoft.

Son's "All-In" AI Strategy

Masayoshi Son has positioned SoftBank as the financier of the AI revolution, and the OpenAI bet is the centerpiece of that strategy. "SBG has positioned OpenAI as its most important partner," the company stated in its March 2025 investment announcement, recognizing OpenAI as "the partner closest to achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)."

The investments are intertwined with Stargate, the massive $500 billion AI infrastructure project announced at the White House in January 2025. SoftBank serves as the financial lead while OpenAI handles operations. The project aims to build data centers with 10 gigawatts of computing capacity across the United States—enough to power AI training and inference at scale that was previously unimaginable.

By September 2025, Stargate had announced five new data center sites—in Texas, Ohio, Wisconsin, and elsewhere—bringing total planned capacity to nearly 7 gigawatts and investment commitments exceeding $400 billion.

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The Setback: Switch Deal Falls Through

The timing of the new investment talks is notable given a fresh setback in SoftBank's infrastructure ambitions. Just yesterday, Bloomberg reported that SoftBank halted talks to acquire US data center operator Switch Inc. in a deal that would have been worth around $50 billion.

Son had pursued Switch for months, convinced that direct control of its energy-efficient data centers would accelerate the Stargate buildout. The deal's collapse "leaves its data center plans in limbo," Bloomberg Intelligence analysts wrote.

The additional OpenAI investment could be interpreted as Son doubling down on the partnership even as the path to physical infrastructure control grows more complicated. Rather than owning data centers outright, SoftBank may be betting that deeper equity ownership in OpenAI itself is the more direct path to capturing AI value.

Public Market Ripple Effects

While SoftBank trades primarily in Tokyo (9984.T), several publicly traded companies stand to benefit—or face risk—from the continued flow of capital into OpenAI and AI infrastructure.

Oracle (orcl)-3.41% — Stargate's Cloud Partner

Oracle is a key Stargate partner, building and operating data centers for OpenAI's AI workloads. CEO Larry Ellison has been explicit about the magnitude of the opportunity: "Several world-class AI companies have chosen Oracle to build large-scale GPU-centric data centers to train their AI models. That's because Oracle builds gigawatt-scale data centers that are faster and more cost-efficient at training AI models than anyone else in the world." 3

Values retrieved from S&P Global

Oracle's capital expenditure has surged to support AI infrastructure demand, reaching $12 billion in Q2 2026 alone—more than double the prior year quarter. Management expects fiscal year 2026 CapEx of approximately $35 billion. 4

Arm Holdings (arm)-2.23% — SoftBank's Crown Jewel

Arm remains SoftBank's most valuable publicly traded asset, with the Japanese conglomerate owning approximately 90% of the chip designer. While separate from the OpenAI investment, Arm's designs power the processors in AI data centers and edge devices.

Values retrieved from S&P Global

SoftBank has been leveraging its Arm stake through margin loans to finance its AI spending spree, while also selling down positions in T-Mobile and completely exiting NVIDIA to raise capital.

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What OpenAI Needs the Money For

OpenAI's voracious appetite for capital reflects the compute-intensive nature of training frontier AI models. The company is reportedly spending billions annually on NVIDIA GPUs, cloud infrastructure, and research talent.

The path to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)—AI that can perform any intellectual task a human can—requires exponentially more computing power with each generation of models. OpenAI's GPT-5 series, currently in development, is expected to require training runs costing hundreds of millions of dollars.

Beyond training, the company is scaling its inference infrastructure to serve the hundreds of millions of ChatGPT users, plus enterprise customers deploying AI in production. As Ellison noted, "The inferencing market will be much, much larger than the AI training market." 1

What to Watch

Near-term catalysts:

• Confirmation of whether the $30 billion investment closes and at what terms
• OpenAI's broader $100 billion round composition—which sovereign wealth funds and strategic investors participate
• Progress on Stargate site construction and capacity coming online

Longer-term questions:

• Can SoftBank continue financing AI bets at this scale without further asset sales?
• Will OpenAI's corporate restructuring (converting from a capped-profit to traditional for-profit structure) proceed smoothly?
• How do Microsoft's rights as OpenAI's original cloud partner interact with Stargate and Oracle?

The talks remain ongoing, and terms could change. But if the $30 billion investment materializes, it would cement SoftBank as perhaps the most committed financial backer of the AI revolution—betting that the trillions spent on infrastructure today will generate returns that dwarf anything in technology history.

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Related Companies: Oracle (orcl)-3.41% · Arm Holdings (arm)-2.23% · Nvidia (nvda)-2.84% · Microsoft (msft)-2.87%

Photo: SoftBank