An $11bn bond to cover a $10bn bill
SoftBank launched a bond sale on Monday to pay for the next instalment of its stake in OpenAI: $10bn of dollar-denominated senior unsecured notes and €1bn of euro notes, roughly $11bn in total. The proceeds fund the third $10bn tranche of its follow-on investment in OpenAI, with the remainder going to general corporate purposes, TechNode Global reported.
The dollar notes come in maturities of 3.5, 5.5 and 7.5 years and the euro notes at four and six. The deal is expected to price on 24 September and settle on 29 September. Citigroup and JPMorgan are leading, alongside Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank.
Below investment grade, and possibly a record
Fitch rates the notes BB+, one notch below investment grade. If the sale closes at its intended size, Reuters reports it would rank among the largest corporate bond offerings anywhere in 2026, and could become the largest non-financial corporate bond deal on record from Asia Pacific and Japan.
The mark it would pass is the $10.93bn raised by 7-Eleven in January 2021, according to Business Standard. That is the shape of this year in one figure: the region’s biggest corporate borrowing is a high-yield issue raised to buy shares in a private AI company.
What it replaces
The notes take out bridge financing SoftBank arranged with banks in March 2026. TechNode, citing the terms, puts that facility at $40bn arranged and $30bn drawn. Moving from a syndicated bridge to public bonds swaps a short bank obligation for term debt held by investors, and fixes the cost of the position for years rather than months.
The size of the position
This is the last of three $10bn tranches scheduled across April, July and October 2026, with the payment expected to close on 1 October. Once it does, SoftBank’s cumulative investment in OpenAI is expected to reach about $64.6bn, for a stake of roughly 13 per cent.
What to watch
Whether the book prices at full size on Thursday, and at what spread. A high-yield borrower funding an equity position in a private company with unsecured term debt is a structure whose cost is set entirely by how bond investors feel about that company on the day they are asked. The spread SoftBank pays this week is, in effect, a market price on OpenAI’s risk.
