SoftBank is negotiating to invest up to $25 billion in OpenAI. This way, the Japanese conglomerate will continue to expand its presence in the field of artificial intelligence, the Financial Times writes.
According to the report, the potential investment would make SoftBank the largest single investor in OpenAI, surpassing Microsoft, which first invested in the ChatGPT developer in 2019. The deal comes after the two companies announced last week that they would jointly invest $100 billion in Stargate, an initiative to build next-generation data centers for AI that could grow to $500 billion over four years.
SoftBank plans to invest between $15 billion and $25 billion directly in OpenAI, in addition to its $15 billion allocated to Stargate, the report said. OpenAI is investing about $15 billion in Stargate, and SoftBank's equity investment could potentially cover OpenAI's infrastructure obligations.
By the way, the talks are taking place against the backdrop of the Chinese startup DeepSeek's release of its new AI model R1, which specializes in "reasoning" and was created on a relatively modest budget. This has caused concern on the stock markets this week.
OpenAI's deal with SoftBank, which has yet to be finalized, could be SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son's largest investment since he invested $16 billion in WeWork. It will also reduce OpenAI's dependence on Microsoft for computing resources, as Microsoft recently agreed to give up its status as the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI.