SoftBank has reported a huge $46 billion gain through its Vision Fund, largely thanks to the rapid rise in value of OpenAI. The Japanese investment giant said most of the profits came from its growing stake in the AI company behind ChatGPT.
SoftBank has already invested more than $30 billion into OpenAI and says its gains from that investment alone reached around $45 billion during the financial year ending in March. In just the final three months of the year, the Vision Fund generated nearly $20 billion in gains, mostly because of OpenAI’s soaring valuation.
The company is aggressively positioning itself at the center of the global AI boom. Earlier this year, SoftBank revealed plans to invest more than $60 billion into OpenAI overall, which could eventually give it about a 13% ownership stake in the company.
In March, OpenAI completed a major funding round led by SoftBank that valued the AI company at roughly $852 billion. Despite growing competition from companies like Google and Anthropic, SoftBank continues to view OpenAI as the core of its long-term AI strategy.
However, the company’s heavy focus on OpenAI has also raised concerns among analysts and credit agencies. S&P Global Ratings recently changed SoftBank’s outlook from “stable” to “negative,” warning that such a large investment could increase financial pressure and weaken the quality of its portfolio.
To help fund its AI push, SoftBank has been selling shares in other companies, including T-Mobile and NVIDIA. The company said those asset sales generated more than $1.4 billion during the year.
Despite losses from some other investments, including Klarna and DiDi Global, SoftBank still finished the year with an overall net profit of nearly 5 trillion yen, supported by the strong performance of its Vision Fund and telecom business.
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