SoftBank’s Big AI Gamble Pays Off – Mostly Thanks to OpenAI

Bloomberg, CNBC, the Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times contributed to this report.

SoftBank just posted a huge win, and it’s almost entirely because of one company: OpenAI.

The Japanese tech giant said its Vision Fund booked a yearly gain of about $46 billion, powered by the soaring value of its OpenAI stake. In the latest quarter alone, the fund gained roughly $20 billion, and nearly all of that came from the same bet.

That’s the headline. The fine print is messier.

SoftBank has been riding OpenAI hard, investing more than $30 billion so far and planning to put in even more. By the time it finishes the full commitment, its total investment will be about $64.6 billion. That gives SoftBank a massive position in one of the hottest names in AI – and a front-row seat to the frenzy around it.

The payoff has been enormous. SoftBank said its cumulative gain on the OpenAI stake hit $45 billion in the year ended March, with more than $25 billion of that coming in the final quarter alone. OpenAI’s latest funding round, which valued the company at $852 billion, helped push those numbers even higher.

But the rest of the portfolio is not nearly as exciting.

SoftBank also took losses on some of its other holdings, including Coupang, DiDi Global and Klarna. So while the OpenAI bet is making the Vision Fund look brilliant, it is also masking some weak spots elsewhere.

That imbalance is starting to worry people. SoftBank has been selling assets, including stakes in companies like T-Mobile and Nvidia, to help fund its OpenAI push. Credit rating agency S&P even cut SoftBank’s outlook to negative earlier this year, citing concerns about debt and portfolio concentration.

The concern is pretty simple: when one investment is doing this much of the heavy lifting, everything starts to hinge on it. If OpenAI keeps climbing, SoftBank looks smart. If not, the whole story gets shakier fast.

Still, for now, the strategy is working. SoftBank’s quarterly profit more than tripled, and annual net income reached ¥5 trillion. That is a massive turnaround, and it puts Masayoshi Son back at the center of the AI conversation he clearly wants to dominate.

The group is not pretending to be conservative. Son is still building SoftBank into an AI heavyweight, and OpenAI remains the centerpiece of that plan. With Arm also helping and the company’s data center ambitions growing in the US, SoftBank is leaning hard into the idea that AI is where the next big wave of value will come from.

For investors, the question is whether this is visionary or just wildly concentrated. Right now, the numbers say one thing clearly: OpenAI is carrying the load.