SoftBank's $40B OpenAI Loan: Biggest AI Bet Ever

SoftBank just borrowed $40 billion — with no collateral — to raise its OpenAI stake to roughly 13%. Five banks backed the deal, including JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and all three of Japan's megabanks. It's the largest dollar-denominated loan in SoftBank's history. S&P has already downgraded the company's credit outlook to negative. The Albis Perception Gap Index scored this story 4 — US media calls it bold AI leadership; European outlets call it dangerous concentration of capital.

One man just bet $64.6 billion that artificial intelligence will be worth more than the economy of Croatia.

Masayoshi Son, SoftBank's founder, has a track record that looks like an EKG. His early Alibaba bet turned $20 million into $60 billion. His Vision Fund poured $10.6 billion into WeWork and watched the valuation crash from $47 billion to $8 billion. By 2023, the Vision Fund had lost a record $32 billion in a single fiscal year.

Now he's going again. Bigger.

The bridge loan, announced Friday, matures in March 2027. SoftBank plans to repay partly by selling other holdings — the same playbook it used when it liquidated its entire Nvidia stake worth $5.8 billion for earlier OpenAI rounds. The loan is unsecured. If SoftBank can't pay, those five banks eat the loss.

What $64.6 billion buys

SoftBank's total OpenAI investment will hit roughly $64.6 billion once this round closes. That buys about 13% of a company valued at $730 billion after its February 2026 funding round — the largest private tech raise in history. Amazon put in $50 billion. Nvidia added $30 billion.

OpenAI isn't profitable. It's projecting $20 billion in revenue for 2026 against $14 billion in losses. It has 900 million weekly ChatGPT users. Whether those users translate into sustainable revenue is the $730 billion question.

The Japan angle nobody's talking about

Here's what makes this more than a corporate loan story. Three of the five lenders — Mizuho, Sumitomo Mitsui, and MUFG — are Japan's three largest banks. SoftBank's Ohio data centre project, part of the Stargate venture with OpenAI and Oracle, falls under a $550 billion US-Japan bilateral investment programme.

This isn't just Son gambling. Japan's financial system is underwriting a national AI strategy through one company. The 10-gigawatt Ohio campus alone would consume a third of Ohio's total generation capacity — nine nuclear reactors' worth.

What the credit agencies see

S&P revised SoftBank's credit outlook to negative, citing "rising exposure to unlisted assets and limited headroom." Translation: SoftBank is borrowing against something nobody can independently price, and it's almost out of room.

The rating agency called OpenAI one of SoftBank's investments with the "weakest credit quality," exposed to "intense competition." Not exactly a ringing endorsement of a $64.6 billion bet.

Son's counter-argument: missing the AI window is riskier than the debt. The market seemed to agree — SoftBank's stock rose on the announcement.

The concentration problem

After this deal, three investors — SoftBank, Microsoft, and Amazon — will control roughly 40% of the company building the most widely used AI system on Earth. Three boardroom relationships deciding what ChatGPT can and can't do, which markets it enters, and how fast it races toward artificial general intelligence.

Nobody elected them. Nobody can un-elect them either.

The last time Son bet this aggressively, he reshaped — and then nearly bankrupted — an entire venture capital ecosystem. This time the stakes aren't startup valuations. They're the infrastructure of intelligence itself.

The bridge loan comes due in March 2027. Twelve months to find out if this was vision or vertigo.