(Bloomberg) — SoftBank Group Corp. sold its entire stake in Nvidia Corp., pocketing $5.83 billion to help bankroll envisioned AI investments at a time investors are questioning the sheer amounts of capital chasing a technology with uncertain future returns.<\/p>\n
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The Nvidia stake sale highlights how founder Masayoshi Son needs money to chase a plethora of projects that range from Stargate data centers to AI robot manufacturing sites in the US. Its exit coincides with a growing debate about whether spending by big tech firms from Meta Platforms Inc. to Alphabet Inc. \u2014 expected to surpass $1 trillion in coming years \u2014 will produce commensurate returns.<\/p>\n
SoftBank is keen to become a leading player in that growing ecosystem, with plans to leverage stakes in sector linchpins from OpenAI to US chip designer Ampere Computing LLC. On Tuesday, SoftBank executives sidestepped questions about whether the industry is fomenting an AI investment bubble, and said the sale had nothing to do with Nvidia itself but was a necessary financing measure.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can\u2019t say if we\u2019re in an AI bubble or not,\u201d Chief Financial Officer Yoshimitsu Goto said during an earnings conference Tuesday. SoftBank sold Nvidia \u201cso that the capital can be utilized for our financing,\u201d he added, without elaborating.<\/p>\n
SoftBank has sold out of Nvidia once before, in 2019 \u2014 three years before the advent of ChatGPT ignited a historic rally. It\u2019s unclear when SoftBank bought back in, but it last disclosed that its stake in the US chipmaker was worth around $3 billion at the end of March. It\u2019s done well just on that measure: Nvidia has gained more than $2 trillion of market value since.<\/p>\n
That rally, along with its investment in OpenAI, helped prop up SoftBank\u2019s bottom line. The Japanese company reported a surprise net income of \u00a52.5 trillion ($16.2 billion) in its fiscal second quarter, far outrunning the average of analyst estimates of \u00a5418.2 billion. OpenAI\u2019s value has risen $14.6 billion since SoftBank invested, Goto said.<\/p>\n
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SoftBank is on track to report its highest annual profit since 2020, said Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Kirk Boodry said. \u201cThe sale of $5.8 billion in Nvidia shares highlights the company\u2019s access to liquidity as its continues its AI investment program.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Son\u2019s initiatives \u2014 which include the Stargate data center rollout as well as a $1 trillion AI manufacturing hub in Arizona \u2014 have seen the billionaire court US President Donald Trump, as well as the chiefs of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and South Korean conglomerates. SoftBank even explored a takeover of US chipmaker Marvell Technology Inc. earlier this year.<\/p>\n
Son\u2019s company now boasts a portfolio that includes some of the world\u2019s most sought-after names in AI, including OpenAI, ByteDance Ltd. and Perplexity AI Inc. Those stakes boosted SoftBank\u2019s paper gains and helped drive a 78% surge in its share price over the three months ending in September \u2014 its best such performance since the December quarter of 2005.<\/p>\n
The company also announced a 4-for-1 stock split that will take place Jan. 1 in a move that helps make its stock accessible to Japanese retail investors.<\/p>\n
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The challenge will be to balance the financing behind a flurry of deals it\u2019s signed, as well as any new initiatives Son may take on in coming months.<\/p>\n
Through its Vision Fund 2, SoftBank will now invest the full $22.5 billion it\u2019s promised OpenAI in December and remove the preconditions it had previously set. SoftBank has plans to acquire US chip designer Ampere Computing LLC for $6.5 billion and has agreed to buy ABB Ltd.\u2019s robotics arm for $5.4 billion.<\/p>\n
The company expanded a margin loan using its Arm Holdings Plc shares to $20 billion from $13.5 billion, of which $11.5 billion remains available. It\u2019s also obtained a bridge loan of $8.5 billion to fund its injection into OpenAI, as well as another bridge loan for the Ampere deal, it said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe simple trade was to buy SoftBank for cheap exposure to Arm shares and a broader AI and tech mix. That idea has more than delivered \u2013 the stock\u2019s more than doubled, far outpacing the modest rise in NAV,\u201d according to a Finimize Research note published on Smartkarma ahead of the earnings release, referring to SoftBank\u2019s net asset value.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut now the discount\u2019s mostly closed, so SoftBank isn\u2019t a \u2018cheap\u2019 way in anymore. So on that basis, it\u2019s likely a good time to sell and take your profits,\u201d it said. <\/p>\n
–With assistance from Vlad Savov and Peter Elstrom.<\/p>\n
(Updates with executive comment from the third paragraph.)<\/p>\n
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\u00a92025 Bloomberg L.P.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Bloomberg) — SoftBank Group Corp. sold its entire stake in Nvidia Corp., pocketing $5.83 billion to help bankroll…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":285121,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,7904,150480,44702,4321,4961,74],"class_list":["post-285120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-bloomberg","tag-chief-financial-officer-yoshimitsu-goto","tag-masayoshi-son","tag-nvidia","tag-softbank","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=285120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285120\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/285121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=285120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=285120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=285120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}