Public shareholders blinked at SoftBank’s AI exposure this week. Its lenders did not.
The Japanese conglomerate has lined up an $11.87B two-year facility from roughly 20 banks to keep funding its OpenAI position, Bloomberg and The Japan Times reported, overshooting an initial $10B target.
The oversubscription carries the message. Lenders remain willing to fund Masayoshi Son’s AI exposure even as public market investors grow nervous about how far and how fast the spending runs.
SoftBank shares fell as much as 13% as the facility landed, part of a global AI selloff that followed warnings from frontier lab leaders about the pace of development.
SoftBank expects cumulative OpenAI investment to reach roughly $64.6B by October, giving it about 13% of the company. That makes the holding one of the largest bets in the group’s history and ties a growing share of its future to a single private lab.
The deal arrives three months after a plan to raise at least $6B against the OpenAI stake stalled on lender hesitation.
Why it matters: private credit, not equity, is now carrying much of the AI buildout, and banks are repricing that risk in real time as public valuations wobble.
