SoftBank has fully exited its investment in U.S. chipmaker Nvidia, selling its remaining shares for about $5.83 billion, the company confirmed Tuesday. The move comes as the Japanese tech conglomerate doubles down on artificial intelligence, channeling resources toward its growing partnership and investments linked to ChatGPT creator OpenAI.
In its latest earnings report, SoftBank revealed that it offloaded 32.1 million shares of Nvidia in October, completing its full exit from the U.S. chipmaker. The company also disclosed that it sold a portion of its T-Mobile holdings, generating an additional $9.17 billion in proceeds.
The divestments are part of SoftBank’s broader effort to unlock capital as it sharpens its focus on artificial intelligence ventures, including its growing alignment with OpenAI and other AI-driven startups.
SoftBank Chief Financial Officer Yoshimitsu Goto told investors that the company’s recent asset sales are part of a broader effort to balance growth and financial stability.
“We want to provide a lot of investment opportunities for investors, while we can still maintain financial strength,” Goto said during an investor presentation. “So through those options and tools we make sure that we are ready for funding in a very safe manner,” he added, describing the Nvidia and T-Mobile stake sales as key steps in the firm’s ongoing strategy of “asset monetization.”
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SoftBank’s decision to fully divest from Nvidia may have caught some investors off guard, but it’s not the first time the company has taken profits from the U.S. chipmaker.
The Vision Fund, SoftBank’s massive tech investment arm was among Nvidia’s early supporters, building a $4 billion stake back in 2017 before selling it off in early 2019. Even with this latest exit, however, SoftBank’s broader business ecosystem continues to rely on Nvidia’s technology, particularly as the Japanese conglomerate expands its footprint in the artificial intelligence space.
The Tokyo-based conglomerate remains deeply tied to Nvidia’s ecosystem through several AI-driven initiatives, including its involvement in the ambitious $500 billion “Stargate” data center project in the United States. The large-scale effort, which aims to build next-generation infrastructure to power artificial intelligence applications, underscores how closely SoftBank’s future ambitions remain linked to Nvidia’s cutting-edge chip technology, even after the share sale.
“This should not be seen, in our view, as a cautious or negative stance on Nvidia, but rather in the context of SoftBank needing at least $30.5bn of capital for investments in the Oct-Dec quarter, including $22.5bn for OpenAI and $6.5bn for Ampere,” Rolf Bulk, equity research analyst at New Street Research, told CNBC.
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According to Dan Baker, an analyst at Morningstar, SoftBank’s decision to sell its Nvidia stake doesn’t signal a major strategic change for the company. ″[SoftBank] made a point of saying that it wasn’t any view on NVIDIA… At the end of the day, they are using the money to invest in other AI related companies,” he said, as quoted by CNBC.
SoftBank’s recent asset sales, combined with a $19 billion profit surge from its Vision Fund, helped the company double its earnings in the fiscal second quarter.
The Vision Fund has been at the forefront of SoftBank’s renewed push into artificial intelligence backing and acquiring companies across the entire AI spectrum, from semiconductor makers and cloud infrastructure providers to developers of large language models and advanced robotics systems.
“The reason we were able to have this result is because of September last year, that was the first time we invested in OpenAI,” said SoftBank’s Goto.
“Our share price recently has been going up and down dynamically… we want to provide as many invest opportunities as possible,” CFO Yoshimitsu Goto said on Tuesday. He added that the company’s four-for-one stock split is designed to make SoftBank’s shares more accessible, aligning with its broader goal of creating “as many investment opportunities for shareholders as possible.”