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SoftBank is in talks to invest up to $25 billion in OpenAI as part of a broader partnership that could see the Japanese conglomerate spend more than $40 billion on AI initiatives with the Microsoft-backed startup, according to Financial Times.<\/p>\n
The potential investment would make SoftBank OpenAI\u2019s largest single backer, the report said<\/a>, surpassing Microsoft, which first invested in the ChatGPT maker in 2019. The deal comes after both companies announced last week they would jointly invest $100 billion in Stargate<\/a>, a U.S. data center project for OpenAI that could expand to $500 billion over four years.<\/p>\n SoftBank plans to invest $15 billion to $25 billion directly into OpenAI in addition to its $15 billion Stargate commitment, the report said. OpenAI will invest around $15 billion in Stargate, with SoftBank\u2019s equity investment potentially covering OpenAI\u2019s infrastructure commitment.<\/p>\n The talks come at a time when Chinese firm DeepSeek\u2019s release of its R1 reasoning model, which was built on a relatively modest budget, rattled public markets this week. <\/p>\n The chip giant Nvidia lost as much as $589 billion in a day before making slight recovery, as investors worried that big investments in expensive AI hardware might not be necessary if companies could achieve similar results with fewer resources.<\/p>\n OpenAI claimed earlier this week that it had found evidence that DeepSeek used its proprietary models to train its own open-source competitor through a technique called \u201cdistillation,\u201d which allows developers to achieve similar results on smaller models at a much lower cost. The company says this would violate its terms of service, which prohibit using outputs to develop competing models.<\/p>\n OpenAI\u2019s deal with SoftBank, which Financial Times says hasn\u2019t finalized, represents SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son\u2019s biggest bet since injecting $16 billion into WeWork. It would also reduce OpenAI\u2019s dependence on Microsoft for computing resources, with Microsoft recently agreeing to give up<\/a> its position as OpenAI\u2019s exclusive cloud provider.<\/p>\n Around 20% of Stargate\u2019s funding is expected to be equity, with the remainder financed through debt secured against assets and cash flow, the report said. OpenAI, which reached a $157 billion valuation last year, is also negotiating to become a for-profit company to facilitate additional fundraising.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n