SoftBank tests its own borrowing limits with $30bn bet on OpenAI - Financial Times

Masayoshi Son, the chief executive of SoftBank Group Corp., has placed the largest single bet of his career: a $30 billion commitment to OpenAI structured across three $10 billion tranches in April, July, and October 2026, according to a February 27 press release from SoftBank. To fund it, the Japanese holding company is seeking up to $40 billion in bridge loans with a 12-month tenor — what would be its largest-ever dollar-denominated borrowing — with JPMorgan Chase among four banks underwriting the package, Bloomberg reported, a finding confirmed by Reuters. Both SoftBank and JPMorgan declined to comment.

The $30 billion is SoftBank's share of a $110 billion round that values OpenAI at $730 billion pre-money — $840 billion post — alongside $30 billion from Nvidia Corp. and $50 billion from Amazon.com, according to Reuters. When the capital is fully deployed, SoftBank's cumulative stake in OpenAI will reach 13 percent.

The bridge loan structure is the part worth staring at. The loans mature in roughly 12 months — well before OpenAI has publicly indicated it plans to list. If an IPO slips, SoftBank needs to refinance $40 billion or liquidate other positions to cover it. S&P Global Ratings responded quickly: it lowered SoftBank's credit outlook to negative from stable, maintaining the BB+ rating but noting that unlisted shares now exceed 50 percent of its portfolio, up from roughly 42 percent in December. S&P was direct about the underlying exposure, describing OpenAI as "one of its investments with the weakest credit quality," according to The Economic Times. Bloomberg Intelligence flagged a harder version of the same problem: an OpenAI IPO is essentially necessary to make the structure work cleanly, and AI bubble risk or geopolitical disruption could delay that listing indefinitely.

SoftBank maintains a loan-to-value policy with a 25 percent normal ceiling and a 35 percent emergency cap. Those numbers are doing real work now. The company has been reorienting its entire portfolio — SoftBank CFO Yoshimitsu Goto told analysts in the Q3 earnings call that 60 percent of SoftBank's assets are now oriented toward artificial superintelligence, according to CNBC's earnings coverage. The Vision Fund's OpenAI position generated a $4.2 billion gain in the December quarter alone, and $17 billion between April and December 2025. Goto had also said, just before the February 27 announcement, that nothing had been decided about further OpenAI investment.

There's an irony worth noting. SoftBank sold its entire Nvidia stake — $5.83 billion — in October 2025 to free capital for the OpenAI commitment, a move reported by CNBC at the time. Weeks later, Nvidia itself put $30 billion into the same OpenAI round. Son traded chip exposure for application-layer exposure; Nvidia held both.

The round's architecture has some detail worth parsing. According to OpenAI's blog, Amazon's $50 billion arrives in two parts: $15 billion immediately and the remaining $35 billion conditional on undisclosed terms. Amazon received exclusive cloud rights for OpenAI's Frontier enterprise product in exchange. Nvidia's participation includes commitments for 3 gigawatts of inference compute and 2 gigawatts of training capacity on its Vera Rubin architecture. OpenAI reports 900 million weekly active users, 50 million paying subscribers, and says Codex usage is on track to triple to 1.6 million weekly users.

The Financial Times, which first framed this as SoftBank testing its own borrowing limits, reported on the structural tension between Son's previous caution on AI capital expenditure and the scale of this commitment. The FT is paywalled and could not be directly accessed; the bridge loan detail comes from Bloomberg's original reporting, with Reuters correspondents Deborah Sophia and Gursimran Kaur independently confirming the structure and the four-bank syndicate.

The 12-month tenor is the clock that matters here. If OpenAI's $730 billion pre-money valuation holds or grows, SoftBank can refinance or absorb the exposure. If it doesn't — if the IPO slips, if AI infrastructure spending tightens, if the valuation re-rates — the bridge comes due while SoftBank is already carrying a negative credit outlook and a balance sheet more than half composed of unlisted assets. Son has been here before. The Vision Fund era produced billion-dollar positions in loss-making companies that eventually collapsed. This is a different structure — debt secured against a revenue-generating company — but the leverage is real, the tenor is short, and S&P just told the market exactly what they think about the collateral.