The loan
SoftBank Group has secured an $11.87bn two-year loan from about 20 banks to support its investment in OpenAI, Bloomberg reported on 14 September, citing people familiar with the deal. The facility was sealed last week and was upsized from an earlier target of $10bn, according to the report as carried by The Japan Times and summarised by Briefs.
SoftBank has not publicly commented on the terms.
One financing among several
The loan adds to a run of borrowing tied to OpenAI. In March SoftBank took a $40bn unsecured bridge loan, of which roughly $30bn was directed to OpenAI, and in August it took a $10bn margin loan backed by its OpenAI shares, Crypto Briefing reported. It is also preparing a sale of high-yield bonds that Briefs put at between $10bn and $20bn, with investor meetings under way in New York.
SoftBank said last week that it would repay the $25.9bn still outstanding on the bridge loan on 15 September.
According to Bloomberg data cited in the reporting, SoftBank has raised about $37bn this year across bonds and loans in Japan and abroad.
The size of the bet
SoftBank aims to have put nearly $65bn into OpenAI by October, Briefs reported, and Crypto Briefing put its stake at roughly 13%. OpenAI’s most recent round, of $110bn, valued the company at about $730bn before the new money, according to Crypto Briefing.
The margin loan is the piece that ties SoftBank’s balance sheet most directly to OpenAI’s valuation. It carries covenants that could require repayment if OpenAI’s value falls significantly, Crypto Briefing noted.
Why the timing matters
The borrowing comes in a week when doubts about the pace of AI development have been voiced from inside the industry. Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei has called on frontier labs to slow down, and OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman told Fortune that OpenAI would not go public in 2026.
That second point bears directly on SoftBank. A listing is the most obvious route for an investor to turn a large private stake into cash or into collateral with a daily market price. With an OpenAI IPO ruled out for this year, SoftBank is financing its commitment with debt secured on, or justified by, a company that does not trade.
What to watch
The $25.9bn repayment on Tuesday, and the bond sale. How much SoftBank can raise, and at what price, will show how much appetite lenders still have for debt whose ultimate support is a stake in a private AI company.
