SoftBank is in talks to invest up to $ 25 billion in Openai as part of a wider partnership which could see that the Japanese conglomerate spend more than $ 40 billion for AI initiatives with the startup on the back of Microsoft, according to at the financial time.
The potential investment would make the largest fundaler of SoftBank Openai, according to the report, exceeding Microsoft, who invested for the first time in the Chatgpt manufacturer in 2019. The agreement comes after the two companies announced the week last as they Invest jointly $ 100 billion in StargateAn American data center project for Openai which could expand $ 500 billion over four years.
SoftBank plans to invest $ 15 billion at $ 25 billion directly in Openai, in addition to its $ 15 billion commitment, the report said. OPENAI will invest about $ 15 billion in Stargate, with SoftBank’s equity investment potentially covering the commitment of OpenAi infrastructure.
The talks occur at a time when the release of the Chinese company Deepseek of its R1 “reasoning” model, which was built on a relatively modest budget, rocked public procurement this week.
The Nvidia flea giant lost up to $ 589 billion in one day before recovering slightly, because investors feared that large investments in expensive AI equipment are not necessary if companies could obtain similar results with fewer resources.
OPENAI said earlier this week that he had found evidence that Deepseek had used OPENAI owner models to form R1 and other models thanks to a technique called “distillation”, which allows developers to obtain performances Similar with smaller models at a much lower cost. The company claims that this would violate its conditions of use, which prohibit the use of results to develop competing models.
The Openai agreement with Softbank, which, according to Financial Times, has not finalized, represents the biggest bet of the founder of Softbank, Masayoshi Son since the injection of $ 16 billion in WeWork. This would also reduce Openai’s dependence to Microsoft for IT resources, with Microsoft recently agreed to abandon Its position as an exclusive OpenAi cloud supplier.
About 20% of Stargate financing should be equity, the rest funded by guaranteed debt against assets and cash flows, according to the report. OPENAI, which reached an evaluation of $ 157 billion last year, also negotiates to become a for -profit business to facilitate additional fundraising.
