Japanese investment group SoftBank plans to invest a further $30 billion in OpenAI in a move that could breach its own borrowing limits.
The group already owns around 11 per cent of the AI company following previous investments totalling $34 billion. By nearly doubling this exposure, the group’s loan-to-value ratio (LTV) is likely to rise above 25 per cent, the threshold it aims to maintain under normal market conditions.
“I don’t deny the possibility in the future that we may go temporarily beyond 25 per cent,” chief financial officer Yoshimitsu Goto told the Financial Times. SoftBank’s LTV has already risen from 16.5 to 20.6 per cent in Q4 2025.
SoftBank’s founder, chairman and largest shareholder Masayoshi Son is a firm believer in artificial superintelligence, predicting at a Riyadh investor conference in 2024 that the technology will be 10,000 times smarter than the human brain and exist by 2035. Achieving this will require hundreds of billions of dollars of investment, he added.
In keeping with this vision, Son has placed SoftBank’s Vision Funds – AI focused funds with $134 billion in assets under management – at the front and centre of the group’s investment strategy despite high-profile losses in 2024 and 2025.
Fears over the profitability of the AI boom and the group’s increasingly concentrated exposure have contributed to a 23.5 per cent fall in its share price since the start of the year, though it remains up 72 per cent since March 2025. S&P revised its outlook on the company to negative this month, citing the planned OpenAI investment.
