SoftBank is ending the year with the completion of its long-anticipated investment in OpenAI, finalizing a commitment of roughly $41 billion and securing an ownership stake of about 11% in the ChatGPT-maker. According to an official statement by SoftBank, the Japanese conglomerate transferred a final tranche of $22.5 billion to the AI firm, closing a multi-stage funding process that began earlier this year.
The deal ranks among the largest private capital raises ever completed by a tech company and places SoftBank behind only Microsoft among OpenAI’s shareholders (the tech titan has a stake of 27%). Apart from this, the newly named “OpenAI Foundation” (the non-profit arm) retains an equity stake of around 26% and governance control.
The Softbank investment was first agreed in March and structured across multiple closings, combining direct capital from SoftBank with a large syndicated component from third-party investors. SoftBank previously confirmed that it invested $7.5 billion through Vision Fund 2 in the first closing, while co-investors contributed an upsized $11 billion alongside the group. With the final payment now complete, the total funding reaches approximately $41 billion, exceeding the originally stated $40 billion target.
People briefed on the transaction said the March agreement valued OpenAI at roughly $300 billion on a post-money basis. Since then, a secondary share sale later in the year reportedly implied a valuation closer to $500 billion, according to data providers tracking private market transactions. OpenAI has not publicly confirmed those figures. For OpenAI, the completed funding round strengthens its financial position as it explores longer-term options, including a possible IPO (which it had hinted at earlier this year).
A major portion of the new capital is expected to support OpenAI’s infrastructure ambitions, particularly its Stargate data centre initiative being developed with Oracle and other partners. The project is designed to add multi-gigawatt computing capacity in the United States over the coming years, aimed at supporting increasingly large and compute-intensive AI systems. Some reports have suggested Stargate could reach as much as 10 gigawatts of capacity by the end of the decade, though OpenAI has not released a detailed public roadmap.
OpenAI has already entered long-term agreements with semiconductor suppliers including Nvidia and Broadcom. Disney has also taken an equity stake tied to content licensing arrangements for OpenAI’s video generation tools Overall, the company’s disclosed infrastructure commitments run into the trillions of dollars over several years, making it one of the most aggressive spenders in the sector.
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