Japanese banking conglomerate SoftBank Group said on Friday it secured a $40 billion bridge loan for its investments in OpenAI and for general corporate purposes. The company had previously agreed to invest $30 billion in OpenAI through its Vision Fund 2. The bridge loan is unsecured, SoftBank said.
The loan, which matures in March 2027, was arranged with lenders including JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Mizuho Bank, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp and MUFG Bank. The company noted that borrowings under the Bridge Facility Agreement are expected to be repaid in stages by the maturity date through the use of existing assets and other financing measures.
This loan highlights SoftBank’s increasing efforts to strengthen ties with OpenAI amid the highly competitive AI race. The $30 billion bet on OpenAI comes in addition to more than $30 billion the company has already invested in the ChatGPT-maker.
READ: SoftBank seeks up to $40 billion loan to fund OpenAI investment (March 6, 2026)
SoftBank, which held about 11% in OpenAI at the end of December 2025, has unloaded assets including its stake in Nvidia to bankroll its growing bet on OpenAI. The U.S. company now represents one of SoftBank’s biggest holdings, alongside a roughly 90% stake in chip designer Arm Holdings, even as investments elsewhere slow. That is tied to SoftBank’s shares to ChatGPT’s relative performance against Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude.
Market observers have previously expressed concerns about the scale of SoftBank’s investment amid concerns of an AI bubble.
SoftBank and OpenAI were among the companies behind the Stargate Project last year, which said it aimed to invest up to $500 billion over four years to build AI infrastructure in the United States. SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son and the then President-elect Donald Trump announced in December 2024 that SoftBank planned to invest $100 billion in AI and related infrastructure in the U.S. over four years.
READ: SoftBank rushes to close a $22.5 billion funding commitment to OpenAI (
SoftBank has also made smaller investments beyond OpenAI of late. SoftBank and OpenAI have jointly invested $1 billion in SB Energy, an infrastructure company working with tech firms on a U.S. buildout of data centers. The company has also agreed to buy private equity firm DigitalBridge Group for about $3 billion in cash. Last year, it bought U.S. chip designer Ampere Computing for $6.5 billion and proposed a $5.4 billion acquisition of ABB’s robotics unit.
In February, OpenAI announced a $110 billion funding round in a massive funding round that would value the company at $840 billion. In addition to the funding from SoftBank, the round would also include an investment of $30 billion from SoftBank, $30 billion from Nvidia and $50 billion from Amazon.