SoftBank reportedly seeks up to $100B from Gulf investors for AI fund

Masayoshi Son has held talks in recent weeks with senior figures across the Gulf, including in the United Arab Emirates. SoftBank is seeking up to $100 billion from those investors.

The ask comes from the founder and chief executive of SoftBank Group, the Tokyo-based investment holding company built around technology stakes that reach from semiconductors to software and the wider internet. Son has run SoftBank since he founded it, and he remains both its chairman and its largest shareholder. Raising as much as $100 billion would place this effort among the largest AI-focused capital raises he has ever pursued.

SoftBank declined to comment. People familiar with the matter said the discussions are still early and that there is no guarantee a deal will be reached.

SoftBank has already committed $65 billion to OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. Last week the company announced it had completed a $30 billion tranche of that investment. Part of the cash came from the debt markets. Last month SoftBank completed an $11.1 billion junk-bond sale, the largest high-yield corporate bond offering on record, with yields reaching as high as 9.75 percent, raised to fund the OpenAI position.

Son has answered the skeptics in public. In July he said that “people who criticize AI are spitting at the sky.” The same month, in another account of his remarks, he said “those who condemn AI are themselves spitting upwards.” SoftBank executives have said that short-term valuation swings in major portfolio companies such as OpenAI would not alter the company’s investment plans. The bond sale and the completed tranche already show how far SoftBank has been willing to stretch its own balance sheet to keep those plans intact. The OpenAI stake now sits, paid for in part at junk yields and still unfinished as a total commitment.

To keep that position funded SoftBank has also borrowed repeatedly against its holding in Arm Holdings, the chip designer. In 2026 the company upsized the Arm-backed margin loan three separate times, most recently by $5 billion in September, tripling the facility to $25 billion. It still carries a separate $40 billion bridging loan that runs until March 2027.

The leverage readings on the same balance sheet do not all match. S&P Global put SoftBank’s loan-to-value ratio at 33 percent in March, roughly double the 17 percent figure the company prefers to cite in public. SoftBank’s own reported ratio stood at 13 percent at the end of June, below its 25 percent target ceiling, against a net asset value of ¥72.3 trillion.

Son tried one further route. He sought to borrow directly against SoftBank’s OpenAI stake itself. That effort stalled. Lenders balked at extending credit against a position in a private company that does not disclose financials the way a listed one would. With that door closed, the remaining path runs through sovereign capital in the Gulf.

The capital would establish a fund built to acquire companies and then use artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies to improve how those companies operate. The mandate is operational—an overhaul of existing businesses rather than another large equity check into a single model maker. SoftBank’s robotics and physical-AI unit, Roze, is expected to play a key role. Physical AI means systems that act in the material world: robots and the software that drives them, not only models that process language or images on a screen. Son hopes to take Roze public at a lofty valuation.

Gulf sovereign capital has filled a vehicle of this scale for SoftBank before. In 2017, Mubadala, one of the UAE’s sovereign wealth funds, and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund backed the first Vision Fund, which raised $100 billion and became the world’s largest technology-focused venture capital fund. By the end of June that fund had generated about $29 billion in cumulative investment gains. A second Vision Fund, backed primarily by SoftBank itself and holding the OpenAI stake among its positions, had generated $20.5 billion over the same period.

The new vehicle would put Roze at the center of buying companies and reworking their day-to-day operations—a different brief from the OpenAI checks SoftBank has already written. The discussions are still early.

So much of SoftBank’s book is tied directly or indirectly to OpenAI and the broader artificial intelligence complex that a fall in OpenAI’s valuation would not stay isolated. One Asia-based analyst said, “A contagion effect . . . could get quite bad, quite quickly.” “the chain reaction could deteriorate sharply in a short period.” SoftBank’s shares fell 5 percent in a single day after reports that OpenAI’s annualised revenue ran about $20 billion below levels previously signalled.

Son has said that artificial intelligence could become “super dangerous” if it falls into the hands of “bad actors.” SoftBank’s share price is still up 25 percent this year, but it has fallen more than 30 percent from its June peak, when the company briefly became Japan’s most valuable. OpenAI’s decision to delay its long-anticipated initial public offering has further intensified concerns that SoftBank’s plans for additional AI investments could be hurt. The valuations that already define so much of the portfolio have started to move before any new capital has closed.

The October 9 reports that first set out the scale of the ask recorded no signed papers. SoftBank’s bridging facility runs to March 2027. The capital has not closed.