SoftBank raises $11.1B in record bond sale to fund AI expansion

SoftBank Group has closed the largest high-yield corporate bond sale in history, raising $11.1 billion to accelerate investments across the artificial intelligence value chain, according to Reuters.

Founder and CEO Masayoshi Son is positioning the Japanese conglomerate as what he calls the world's leading AI platform, with capital deployed across semiconductors, data centers, large language models, and robotics. The bond sale provides ammunition for Son's aggressive expansion strategy following years of volatile returns from the company's Vision Fund investments.

The OpenAI anchor

SoftBank's largest single bet remains OpenAI, where the company has committed approximately $60 billion across multiple tranches. After an initial $500 million investment in 2024, SoftBank poured roughly $30 billion into the ChatGPT maker in 2025 and committed another $30 billion in 2026, with the final installment closing next week. These investments will give SoftBank approximately 13% of OpenAI's equity.

As of June, OpenAI's rising private valuations had generated $45 billion in unrealized gains for SoftBank. However, OpenAI has delayed its public listing, preventing SoftBank from realizing those gains and limiting market validation of the AI company's valuation.

Building the infrastructure layer

Beyond software, SoftBank is assembling physical AI infrastructure. The company acquired digital infrastructure investor DigitalBridge for $4 billion in December 2025, gaining exposure to data centers, cell towers, fiber networks, and edge infrastructure. DigitalBridge is among the investors in Stargate, a joint venture between SoftBank, OpenAI, and Oracle that President Donald Trump unveiled in January 2025 with plans to invest up to $500 billion over four years.

Stargate has faced delays due to protracted negotiations and site selection decisions, according to SoftBank CFO Yoshimitsu Goto in August 2025. As part of the initiative, SoftBank and OpenAI each invested $500 million in SB Energy to build and operate a 1.2-gigawatt OpenAI data center in Texas.

Semiconductor supply chain dominance

SoftBank's chip investments span the design and manufacturing spectrum. The company announced a $2 billion equity stake in Intel in August, betting on expanded U.S. chip manufacturing capacity. That position generated $8.39 billion in valuation gains through June as Intel shares surged.

In March, SoftBank acquired Ampere Computing for $6.5 billion, securing a data center CPU designer founded by a former Intel president. Ampere's chips use architecture from Arm Holdings, the British chip designer that SoftBank majority-owns and took public in 2023. SoftBank's Arm stake was worth $232.41 billion in August 2026 as semiconductor valuations soared.

SoftBank also acquired British AI chipmaker Graphcore in 2024 for an undisclosed sum and purchased Swiss engineering group ABB's robotics business for $5.4 billion in October 2025.

Why it matters

SoftBank's capital deployment illustrates how established technology conglomerates are using debt markets to finance AI expansion at unprecedented scale. The $11.1 billion bond sale—the largest high-yield corporate issuance on record—signals investor appetite for AI exposure even through leveraged vehicles. For enterprises evaluating AI infrastructure partners, SoftBank's vertical integration strategy across chips, data centers, and foundation models represents a bet that controlling multiple layers of the stack will prove more valuable than point solutions. The approach also concentrates significant risk: SoftBank's $45 billion in unrealized OpenAI gains remain paper profits until the company goes public, and the conglomerate previously sold its Nvidia stake in 2019 before the AI boom accelerated.

Details of SoftBank's investments and bond sale were first reported by Reuters.