The unsecured facility, arranged with JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Mizuho, SMBC and MUFG, matures in March 2027. Once SoftBank’s $30B follow-on investment in OpenAI closes, its cumulative stake will total approximately $64.6B, representing roughly 13% of the company.
Masayoshi Son has never been accused of thinking small, but the pace and scale of his bet on OpenAI is entering territory that is making credit rating agencies nervous.
SoftBank Group announced on Friday that it has secured a $40 billion bridge loan, the largest dollar-denominated loan in its history, to fund its follow-on investment in OpenAI and for general corporate purposes.
The unsecured facility was arranged with JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Mizuho Bank, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, and MUFG Bank, and matures on 25 March 2027.
The loan provides the financing for SoftBank’s $30 billion follow-on investment in OpenAI through its Vision Fund 2. SoftBank entered into a definitive agreement with OpenAI on 27 February 2026 to participate in the company’s ongoing fundraising round.
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That round, which OpenAI announced in February, seeks to raise $110 billion in total at a valuation of $840 billion, with $30 billion from SoftBank, $30 billion from Nvidia, and $50 billion from Amazon.
Upon completion, SoftBank’s cumulative investment in OpenAI is expected to reach approximately $64.6 billion, giving it an ownership interest of around 13%.
The context for a $40 billion bridge loan is the pace of Son’s escalation. SoftBank held roughly 11% of OpenAI at the end of December 2025, already an enormous position.
To finance previous OpenAI investments, it has liquidated other holdings including its stake in Nvidia. The Vision Fund portfolio that made Son’s reputation in the 2010s has swung sharply between record gains and substantial losses; the OpenAI bet is, in effect, a concentrated wager that generative AI will produce returns that justify the leverage.
This week, S&P lowered its credit outlook on SoftBank, citing concerns that the scale of its OpenAI exposure could impair the company’s liquidity and the credit quality of its broader asset base.
The broader architecture that SoftBank is financing is well established. The company was a founding partner of the Stargate Project alongside OpenAI and others, an initiative announced in early 2025 that targets up to $500 billion in US AI infrastructure investment over four years.
In December 2024, Son and then President-elect Donald Trump jointly announced that SoftBank planned to invest $100 billion in AI and related infrastructure in the US over four years.
The $40 billion bridge loan is, in part, the mechanism by which that commitment is being funded. Borrowings under the facility are expected to be repaid in stages through to maturity via the utilisation of existing assets and other financing sources.
