According to Fast Company, SoftBank Group is in a frantic race to close a massive $22.5 billion funding commitment to OpenAI by the end of 2024. CEO Masayoshi Son is pulling every lever to raise cash, including selling SoftBank’s entire $5.8 billion stake in Nvidia and offloading $4.8 billion of its T-Mobile US holdings. Internally, he’s slowed the Vision Fund to a crawl, requiring his personal sign-off for any deal over $50 million. The plan also hinges on a delayed PayPay IPO, now expected in Q1 of 2025, which could raise over $20 billion. This “all-in” bet is one of Son’s biggest ever as he tries to secure a top position in the AI race.
The “All-In” Mentality Gets Real
Here’s the thing: selling your entire stake in Nvidia, the undisputed king of AI chips, to fund a bet on an AI software company is a breathtaking move. It’s the definition of putting all your eggs in one basket. And that basket is OpenAI. Son isn’t just investing; he’s dismantling other parts of his empire to make this happen. Slashing staff and freezing nearly all other Vision Fund deals shows this isn’t a side project. This is the project. The $50 million approval rule is especially telling—it means Son’s focus is so singular that even moderately sized bets elsewhere are now a distraction he can’t afford.
The PayPay Wild Card
But the whole plan has a giant, looming dependency: the PayPay IPO. A $20+ billion debut would solve most of the funding problem in one shot. But IPOs are fickle. Market conditions shift, investor appetite wanes, and “expected in Q1” can quickly become “delayed indefinitely.” It’s a huge risk to anchor a strategy this massive on a single liquidity event that’s already been pushed back once. What if the market isn’t ready for a mega-tech IPO next year? Son seems to be betting that the AI hype will buoy everything, but that’s a dangerous assumption. Basically, he’s counting on a perfect financial storm to align.
What This Means For AI Competition
So what does a $22.5 billion infusion actually do for OpenAI? It cements its position as the best-funded player in the generative AI space, by a country mile. This isn’t just runway for more ChatGPT upgrades; this is capital for massive compute infrastructure, aggressive talent acquisition, and potentially even vertical integration into hardware. It could allow OpenAI to operate with a level of financial independence from Microsoft that we haven’t seen before. The AI arms race is already expensive, but SoftBank’s move threatens to make it prohibitively so for anyone not backed by a sovereign wealth fund or a tech giant.
gamble-on-vision-again”>A Gamble On Vision, Again
Look, Masayoshi Son is no stranger to huge, concentrated bets. Some, like Alibaba, made him a legend. Others, like WeWork, nearly broke his funds. This OpenAI play feels different in scale and desperation. He’s not just deploying capital from a fund; he’s actively stripping the company’s assets to make it happen. It’s the ultimate test of his conviction that AGI is the only thing that matters. The question is, will this monumental bet finally deliver the home run he’s been chasing since the Vision Fund’s rocky start, or will it be remembered as his most spectacular overreach? The next 18 months will give us the answer.
