SoftBank books $12 billion profit on OpenAI stake gains

TOKYO, May 13 : Technology investor SoftBank Group reported on Wednesday that its net profit more than tripled to 1.83 trillion yen ($11.60 billion) in the January-March quarter, as it booked gains on its investment in ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.  It was SoftBank's fifth consecutive quarterly profit, with the Vision Fund investing arm booking an OpenAI-driven gain of 3.1 trillion yen in the quarter.  SoftBank founder and CEO Masayoshi Son is one of OpenAI's most enthusiastic backers, with the group saying its cumulative gains on the investment total $45 billion.  But the scale of the OpenAI wager - SoftBank's most ambitious spending programme since the launch of the Vision Fund investment vehicles in 2017 and 2019 - has raised questions about financing pressures on the group.  Critics also say OpenAI no longer enjoys a dominant position among large language model developers as peers such as Alphabet's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude grab market share, while the cost to train and run AI models is also rising. SoftBank has sold off stakes in holdings such as T-Mobile and Nvidia, issued bonds and taken out loans, backed by its holdings in chip designer Arm and its domestic telecommunications arm SoftBank Corp.  SoftBank arranged a bridge loan agreement totalling $40 billion in March. On Wednesday, it said $20 billion was drawn down in April, primarily for the OpenAI investment, and $2.5 billion had already been repaid. SoftBank had previously said it had agreed to invest a further $30 billion in OpenAI over the course of 2026, which would bring its cumulative investment to $64.6 billion for a 13 per cent stake. The group booked a 278.6 billion yen gain on its investment in chipmaker Intel , which is led by former SoftBank board member Lip-Bu Tan. SoftBank has also sought to build a portfolio of robotics firms, looking to gain a foothold in an industry that is in its infancy but is seen by analysts and investors as having potential to drive profits into the future. It agreed to acquire the robotics business of Swiss engineering group ABB in a $5.4 billion deal last year, and created a new subsidiary within the group to hold its robotics-related stakes. ($1 = 157.7300 yen)