Just as OpenAI, the vanguard of generative AI, announced that it would not pursue a public listing (IPO) in 2026, the wellspring of capital in the primary market continues to surge in unabated. According to a recent report, SoftBank has successfully finalized a two-year syndicated loan worth as much as $11.87 billion. This sum exceeds the original $10 billion target, and its chief purpose is precisely to lend full support to its strategic investment in the American AI giant OpenAI.
Oversubscribed by Billions: 20 Global Banks Lend Their Backing
People familiar with the matter reveal that SoftBank formally signed this two-year loan agreement with around 20 international banks last week. Because the market’s appetite for financing top-tier AI assets proved exceedingly fervent, the loan ultimately met with oversubscription, expanding the total raised from the originally planned $10 billion to nearly $11.9 billion. Bloomberg first reported the details of SoftBank’s upsized loan in its OpenAI funding push.
The arrival of this colossal financing will greatly replenish SoftBank’s war chest on the generative AI battlefield. Beforehand, SoftBank founder and CEO Masayoshi Son had repeatedly reaffirmed in public his resolve to wager on the era of “superintelligence” (ASI), declaring that he would not hesitate to deploy all of SoftBank’s liquidity and financing leverage to secure a decisive voice among the world’s frontier AI companies.
Avoiding Public Scrutiny, OpenAI Relies on Private Giants to Keep the Blood Flowing
This billion-dollar-level injection precisely echoes the recent remarks of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. In an earlier interview, Altman candidly admitted that, before model safety and escape risks were thoroughly resolved, he believed now was by no means a wise moment to take OpenAI into the public market, and he flatly denied the possibility of a 2026 IPO.
Since it cannot raise funds publicly through the stock market in the short term, OpenAI, to bear the immense training compute and data-center construction costs of its future frontier models, must inevitably lean even more heavily on the capital injections of heavyweight private investors such as SoftBank and Microsoft.
SoftBank’s acquisition of nearly $12 billion in low-cost funds through this bank syndication thus plays precisely the role of a strategic force providing OpenAI with vast liquidity.
Unwilling to Miss the Next Alibaba: Son’s Leveraged AI Gamble
For SoftBank and Masayoshi Son, the past glory of backing Alibaba in the mobile internet age once laid SoftBank’s foundation. However, the subsequent failures of Vision Fund-era investments in startups such as WeWork left SoftBank dormant for several years.
Now, before the historic tide of generative AI and AGI, Son plainly displays an utterly aggressive posture of “never repeating past mistakes.”
Facing rival Anthropic, which is reportedly in close talks with NVIDIA over a $2 trillion mega-IPO valuation, OpenAI, to maintain its lead in algorithm research and commercialization, burns through astronomical cash flow every month. That SoftBank would, at this juncture, unhesitatingly borrow nearly $12 billion jointly from 20 banks amounts, in essence, to using financial leverage to secure itself a weighty “founder-level board seat” ticket within OpenAI.
This strategy of wagering vast assets on a single unlisted giant carries extremely high concentration risk. Yet for Son, so long as OpenAI can be the first to cross the AGI threshold and establish a monopoly in the enterprise inference market, this nearly $11.9 billion financing cost may well become SoftBank’s most profitable deal of the century in the post-smartphone era.
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