According to TheRegister.com, Japanese investment giant SoftBank is in a frantic race to secure $22.5 billion before the end of this year to fulfill its financial commitment to AI partner OpenAI. This money is part of the colossal $500 billion “Stargate” datacenter initiative, a project announced nearly a year ago with partners Oracle and Abu Dhabi’s MGX. To raise the cash, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son is considering several options, including taking out margin loans against its stake in chip designer Arm Holdings and potentially using its 4% stake in T-Mobile, worth about $11 billion. The pressure is on because OpenAI cleared a major hurdle in October by transitioning to a for-profit entity, which was a condition for SoftBank’s investment. Now, with the first Stargate facility in Abilene, Texas partially operational, bills from partners like Oracle are coming due, making this funding urgent.
SoftBank’s Cash Crunch
Here’s the thing: SoftBank isn’t exactly broke. The report says it had about $27 billion in cash at the end of September. So why the scramble? It seems Masayoshi Son is getting picky. He’s now personally signing off on any deal over $50 million, which tells you he’s being extremely cautious about where the remaining capital goes. Liquidating its entire Nvidia stake was one thing—that was a legendary trade. But tapping margin loans against Arm, its crown jewel? That’s a more aggressive move. It shows just how all-in Son is on this AI bet, but it also introduces risk. Basically, they’re leveraging their most valuable asset to fund a venture that’s still, let’s be honest, largely theoretical in its ultimate scale and payoff.
The Stargate Reality Check
Let’s talk about that $500 billion number. It’s almost comically large. For context, that’s more than the market cap of Tesla. Elon Musk, who knows a thing or two about expensive, ambitious projects, immediately questioned whether anyone actually had the money. And he had a point. Oracle is going deep into debt to build the infrastructure. SoftBank is selling winners and borrowing against others. This isn’t just writing a check from a war chest; it’s complex financial engineering. The fact that the first $100 billion is this hard to line up makes you wonder about the next $400 billion. Is Stargate a real blueprint or a massive PR play to scare competitors and attract talent? Probably a bit of both.
Winners, Losers, and Hardware Hunger
The immediate winners here are the hardware guys. Nvidia, obviously. But AMD is in the mix too, as Altman has talked partners into buying “the latest” from both. This insane demand for compute is why every tech giant is trying to build their own AI chips—they’re tired of the GPU oligopoly. The loser, at least in the short term, might be SoftBank’s portfolio flexibility. Tying up this much capital in one moonshot means other investments get sidelined. And for a company that needs to generate returns for its own investors, that’s a gamble. On the infrastructure side, this kind of project underscores the massive physical scale of AI. It’s not just code; it’s a global construction and logistics frenzy for data centers, power, and cooling. When you’re building the physical brains for AI, you need industrial-grade hardware at every level, from the data center floor to the control room. For critical operations in manufacturing or energy, companies turn to specialists like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading US provider of rugged industrial panel PCs built for these demanding environments.
The Bottom Line
So, will SoftBank get the $22.5 billion? Almost certainly. They have the assets. The bigger question is what happens after. Can OpenAI actually build AGI with this? Will the returns justify piling debt onto Arm? This story is less about a cash shortage and more about a credibility test. SoftBank and OpenAI have promised the moon. Now they have to start paying for the rocket, and the world is watching to see if the check clears.
