SoftBank’s financing of OpenAI reached completion in late December 2025 with the company transferring the final portion of its pledged capital, including roughly $22 billion to $22.5 billion, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke to CNBC.
Combined with earlier contributions, roughly $8 billion invested directly and another $10 billion syndicated with co-investors, SoftBank’s total commitment now stands at about $40 billion.
The deal first took shape in early 2025 when SoftBank agreed to lead the financing round that could reach $40 billion through a mix of direct funding and syndicated backing.
That figure made the pact one of the most substantial private fundraising efforts in technology history, significantly bolstering OpenAI’s resources for model development and related infrastructure projects.
OpenAI Valuation Near Half-Trillion Dollar Mark
At the time of the initial agreement in March 2025, the round valued OpenAI at about $300 billion on a post-money basis. Subsequent secondary stock transactions completed in October lifted estimates of the company’s market valuation to approximately $500 billion, according to PitchBook.
OpenAI’s rise toward that scale reflects rapid adoption of its generative models and enterprise services, which have driven revenue growth and broadened the company’s engagement with developers, enterprises and cloud partners. The firm’s products sit at the center of the evolving landscape of large language model applications across sectors.
Strategic Context For SoftBank’s AI Capital Deployment
SoftBank’s completion of this funding commitment comes amid a broader reallocation of capital within its investment portfolio toward artificial intelligence and related infrastructure. To secure the necessary resources, it sold stakes in prior holdings including Nvidia and T-Mobile shares, a move noted by multiple media reports.
Masayoshi Son, founder and chief executive of SoftBank, has publicly positioned the company as a long-term backer of intelligence technologies. This investment in OpenAI complements other strategic ventures that connect computational power, data center capacity and advanced machine learning platforms.
Programs And Infrastructure Tied To Growth Trajectory
OpenAI and its partners have advanced several large-scale computing initiatives aimed at expanding the backbone needed for next-generation models. One of these is the Stargate project, a multi-year data center infrastructure initiative involving OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle and other backers. The effort represents a coordinated push to build capacity that can support intensive model training and deployment requirements.
This infrastructure focus is broadly aligned with the industry’s drive to deploy petaflops-scale systems and anticipatory capacity for AI models that demand increasing volumes of compute, storage and networking resources.
What This Means For AI Capital Dynamics
The completion of SoftBank’s funding commitment to OpenAI highlights how large pools of private capital are being marshaled around a small number of leading AI developers. That financial concentration could influence how compute resources, talent and institutional deployment strategies evolve in 2026 and beyond.
For OpenAI, securing the full $40 billion provides substantial runway to pursue computational scale, model development, and data center expansion without immediate pressure from public markets. At the same time, it anchors SoftBank’s position as a major global investor in commercial AI development.
