SoftBank cashes out $5.83B Nvidia stake to back OpenAI

SoftBank just dumped its entire stake in Nvidia, cashing out $5.83 billion to fund an aggressive, all-in push into OpenAI.

According to its latest earnings statement, the Japanese conglomerate offloaded 32.1 million Nvidia shares in October. Alongside that, it sold a massive $9.17 billion chunk of its T-Mobile holdings and tapped margin loans on its Arm stake to amass a serious war chest.

SoftBank CFO Yoshimitsu Goto described the aggressive moves as part of the company's asset monetization strategy, insisting the firm wants to keep its financial powder dry while funding massive bets. Nvidia shares slipped 2% on the news.

Cashing out chip gains to double down on Altman

Sources familiar with the moves made one thing clear: dumping Nvidia was not a bet against the chipmaker or a sign of panic over AI valuations. SoftBank simply needed raw cash.

According to New Street Research analyst Rolf Bulk, SoftBank requires at least $30.5 billion in capital for the October-December quarter alone. That covers a massive $22.5 billion check for OpenAI and another $6.5 billion for chip firm Ampere. To put that in perspective, SoftBank is deploying more capital in a single three-month stretch than it did across the previous two full years combined.

The fresh $22.5 billion investment will catapult SoftBank's stake in OpenAI from 4% to 11%. Goto pointed out that OpenAI's latest valuation benchmark of $500 billion represents one of the largest private valuations on the planet. SoftBank also teased that it could bump its stake even higher down the road, though sources noted it intends to stay under a 40% controlling threshold.

If this feels like déjà vu, that is because it is. SoftBank’s Vision Fund famously built a $4 billion stake in Nvidia in 2017, only to dump the entire position in January 2019, right before the explosive AI rally took off. Even with this latest exit, SoftBank remains deeply tied to Nvidia hardware through megaprojects like the $500 billion Stargate data center initiative in the U.S.

Why it matters

We think this trade exposes a massive strategic pivot happening at the top of the AI food chain. SoftBank is trading hardware certainty for software dominance.

Holding Nvidia today is essentially holding an AI index fund with solid cash flow, but at multi-trillion-dollar levels, the upside is bounded. OpenAI, on the other hand, represents the high-stakes jackpot of the entire agentic future. By taking chips off the table from a supplier whose tech it still relies on, SoftBank is freeing up liquidity to cement its role as Sam Altman's premier non-Microsoft backer.

The danger here is glaring. SoftBank is liquidating bulletproof public assets to pour dozens of billions into an unlisted company burning billions every year at a staggering $500 billion valuation. If public sentiment around an AI bubble curdles further, or if OpenAI hits a wall in model training or monetization, SoftBank could easily find itself trapped in another brutal liquidity crunch. But Son has never played it safe, and this move proves he is willing to risk it all to own a double-digit slice of the frontier.