Analysis
Masayoshi Son is in early talks with Gulf sovereign investors, including senior figures in the UAE, to raise as much as $100 billion for a new fund that would buy companies and upgrade them with AI and other advanced technology, according to Dealroom, which cited original reporting by the Financial Times. Bloomberg corroborated the figure the same day. No deal is assured, and SoftBank declined to comment on the talks.
Why Son Needs New Money
SoftBank has already put $65 billion into OpenAI, a stake now held through Vision Fund 2 and valued at $20.5 billion as of end-June -- a number that implies the position has moved against SoftBank since OpenAI's IPO was delayed and investors began reassessing the company's AI exposure more broadly.
“SoftBank's shares are down more than 30% from their June peak and fell another 5% after OpenAI's own revenue figures came into question this week.”
The firm raised $11.1 billion last month in the largest high-yield corporate bond sale globally, at yields up to 9.75%, partly backed by its Arm stake, to help fund the OpenAI commitment Pulse covered in that bond sale. SoftBank's shares are down more than 30% from their June peak and fell another 5% after OpenAI's own revenue figures came into question this week.
Roze, SoftBank's robotics and physical-AI unit that Son hopes to eventually take public at a rich valuation, is expected to play a central role in whatever this new fund buys. That's consistent with Son's pattern since the original $100 billion Vision Fund in 2017, backed in part by Saudi Arabia's PIF and Abu Dhabi's Mubadala: raise outside capital to make concentrated, highly leveraged bets on a thesis -- first the mobile internet, then WeWork-style software, now AI -- rather than fund them from SoftBank's own balance sheet.
The Numbers in Context
SoftBank's loan-to-value ratio sits at 13% against a self-imposed 25% ceiling, so the firm has formal headroom to borrow more. But headroom isn't the same as appetite: a fund this size would be roughly five times the $20 billion Nvidia and SoftBank jointly added to OpenAI's funding round just over a week ago, and nearly equal to the original Vision Fund that took SoftBank most of a decade to deploy. Gulf sovereign wealth funds have been moving from passive LPs to direct AI dealmakers all year, and a $100 billion mandate would make them SoftBank's largest single AI partner outside of its own balance sheet.
What the headline misses: this is a fundraising ask, not a committed fund. SoftBank has pursued similarly scaled ambitions before -- the original Vision Fund's $100 billion target slipped for months before it closed, and WeWork showed what happens when concentrated bets go wrong. Whether Gulf investors commit at anywhere near $100 billion, and on what terms, is still unknown.
No term sheet has materialized yet, and whether Roze's IPO timeline moves in tandem with these fundraising talks is the detail that will reveal whether this is new capital for deals or life support for an existing one.
