SoftBank Group secured an $11.87 billion two-year loan from roughly 20 banks last week, exceeding its original $10 billion target, as the Japanese conglomerate races to fund founder Masayoshi Son's expanding bet on OpenAI. The facility adds to a separate $10 billion margin loan the company already holds against its OpenAI stake, deepening SoftBank's reliance on debt markets to bankroll one of the largest single corporate wagers on the AI boom.
SoftBank's cumulative investment in OpenAI is on track to reach roughly $64.6 billion by October, a stake reported at around 13% of the ChatGPT maker. The new loan lands the same week SoftBank is set to prepay $25.9 billion of the remaining balance on a separate $40 billion bridge loan, according to Bloomberg's reporting on the financing. The company is also preparing to meet investors in New York this week to gauge appetite for a dollar-denominated junk bond sale that could raise an additional $10 billion to $20 billion.
Shares fall as debt keeps flowing
The financing news coincided with a rough day for SoftBank's stock, which fell as much as 13% on Monday — its steepest single-day drop since late June, according to Tech Startups' account of the trading session. The decline came as warnings from AI executives about the pace and safety of frontier model development rattled sentiment across AI-linked stocks more broadly, adding pressure on companies like SoftBank that have staked their balance sheets on the sector's continued growth.
The gap between debt and equity markets is the more striking part of the story. Banks remain willing to extend tens of billions of dollars in credit against SoftBank's OpenAI position — the loan was oversubscribed relative to its original target — even as equity investors grow more skeptical that the company's AI spending will generate returns that justify its current valuation. That divergence mirrors a broader pattern across the AI industry this year, where compute and infrastructure commitments have kept expanding on borrowed money even as public markets periodically flinch.
SoftBank has increasingly relied on a patchwork of financing tools — margin loans, asset-backed borrowing and now a fresh bank facility — to fund its OpenAI position without diluting its equity holders further. Son has described the OpenAI investment as central to SoftBank's long-term strategy, betting that artificial general intelligence will become the defining technology of the coming decade even as the near-term costs of that bet mount.
The combination of an oversubscribed loan, a looming bridge-loan prepayment and a planned bond roadshow signals SoftBank has no intention of slowing its OpenAI commitments despite Monday's stock slide. Investors will get a clearer read on market appetite once the New York bond meetings conclude and pricing on the potential $10 billion-to-$20 billion offering becomes public.
