SoftBank's growing bets on AI and semiconductor assets

Reuters

3 hours ago

Aug 19 (Reuters) - SoftBank (9984.T), opens new tab announced on Tuesday a $2 billion investment in Intel (INTC.O), opens new tab that will add to the Japanese tech investor's ambitious bet on artificial intelligence and the chip industry.
Below are major AI investments SoftBank has announced so far.
On August 18, SoftBank announced a $2 billion equity investment in Intel (INTC.O), opens new tab, saying the deal reflected its belief that chip manufacturing and supply would expand further in the U.S., and the U.S. company would play a critical role.
Stargate is a joint venture between SoftBank, ChatGPT's creator OpenAI, and Oracle (ORCL.N), opens new tab. U.S. President Donald Trump announced the project in January, saying that the companies would invest up to $500 billion.
On August 7, SoftBank CFO Yoshimitsu Goto said the project, for which SoftBank is leading financing, had been delayed by longer than expected negotiations with other parties and decisions on sites.
Goto said at the time SoftBank remained committed to its target of building $500 billion worth of data centres over four years and the banks involved in the project financing, including Japan's "megabanks" and major U.S. lenders, had shown positive interest in the scheme.
SoftBank has yet to release details on what kinds of returns its financing of the Stargate project could generate. The extent of third-party investment will determine what other financing tools, such as bank loans and debt issuance, it may have to deploy.
On August 18, Taiwan's Foxconn (2317.TW), opens new tab said that it planned to manufacture data centre equipment with SoftBank at the Taiwanese firm's former electric vehicle factory in Ohio as part of the Stargate project.
SoftBank is leading a $40 billion funding round for OpenAI. It has until the end of 2025 to fund its $22.5 billion portion, although the remainder has been subscribed, according to a source familiar with the matter.
The three-year-old startup that operates an AI-powered search engine has raised about $1 billion in funding so far from investors including Nvidia and SoftBank. It was last valued at $14 billion.
SoftBank announced a $6.5 billion deal in March to acquire Ampere Computing, a U.S. chip designer startup founded by the former president of Intel.
Ampere makes data centre central processing unit chips based on computing architecture from SoftBank's majority-owned Arm Holdings that are used by firms such as Oracle in their cloud computing infrastructure.
In 2024, SoftBank bought the British AI chipmaker for an undisclosed sum.
Once touted as a rival to Nvidia, Graphcore had struggled to secure the investment needed to compete.
The British chip designer owned by SoftBank went public in 2023, securing a valuation of $54.5 billion.
SoftBank still owns the majority of the company.
Arm-based devices power nearly every smartphone in the world and server chips based on its intellectual property have made significant inroads in the data centre market.
As part of a broad plan to increase its business, Arm has sought to expand beyond supplying crucial chip intellectual property to building its own complete designs.
SoftBank had owned around 5% of Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab until it sold the stake in 2019, before ChatGPT generated a surge in AI interest at the end of 2022.
It has been building up its stake again and held Nvidia shares worth around $4.8 billion as of the end of June this year, according to an SEC filing.