SoftBank books 1.83 trillion yen profit on OpenAI stake gains

[TOKYO] Technology investor SoftBank Group reported on Wednesday that its net profit more than tripled to 1.83 trillion yen (S$14.8 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 US$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.

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Wednesday’s results showed it had sold off US$16.25 billion in T-Mobile shares over the financial year. REUTERS