SoftBank in talks to invest up to $25 billion in OpenAI

SoftBank is in talks to invest up to $25 billion in OpenAI, which would make it the startup’s top backer, CNBC has confirmed.

The deal has not been finalized yet, according to a person with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be named because the negotiations are confidential. The FT was first to report on SoftBank’s potential investment.

In November, OpenAI allowed employees to sell about $1.5 billion worth of shares in a tender offer to SoftBank, people familiar with the matter told CNBC at the time. One source said that SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son was persistent in asking for a larger stake in the startup after putting $500 million into OpenAI’s last funding round.

SoftBank, OpenAI and Oracle are partnering in a joint venture called Stargate that was unveiled at the White House by President Donald Trump last week. The plan calls for billions of dollars to be invested in U.S. artificial intelligence infrastructure.

OpenAI, which to date has counted on Microsoft as its key investor, is moving toward a for-profit structure. Founded in 2015 as a nonprofit, OpenAI is creating a public benefit corporation to oversee commercial operations, removing some of its nonprofit restrictions and allowing it to function more like a high-growth startup. That means it needs more capital and more compute to compete in the generative AI arms race, a market that analysts say could reach $1 trillion within a decade.

“The hundreds of billions of dollars that major companies are now investing into AI development show what it will really take for OpenAI to continue pursuing the mission,” OpenAI’s board wrote in a blog post last month.

OpenAI has been valued at $157 billion valuation by private investors. In late 2022, the company launched its ChatGPT chatbopt and kicked off the boom in generative AI. OpenAI closed its latest $6.6 billion round in October, gearing up to aggressively compete with Elon Musk’s xAI as well as Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Anthropic.

Meanwhile, a Chinese rival is blowing up in the U.S. DeepSeek, an AI startup lab out of China, saw its app soar to the top of Apple’s App Store rankings this week and roiled U.S. markets on reports that its powerful model was trained at a fraction of the cost of U.S. competitors.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman described DeepSeek’s R1 model as “impressive,” and wrote on X that “we will obviously deliver much better models and also it’s legit invigorating to have a new competitor!”

SoftBank didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

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