š° $65B Power Play: SoftBank has raised over $64B via retail bonds, nearly 42% of Japanās entire market. The money flows almost entirely into Sonās AI bet: OpenAI, Stargate data centers and physical-AI acquisitions.
šĀ Stock signals doubt: Since the peak, SoftBank shares are down about 40%, wiping out over $100B in market value. Investors are increasingly valuing SoftBank as a leveraged OpenAI bet.
āļø Compute control: Son has sold his Nvidia stake, but OpenAI remains heavily dependent on Nvidia GPUs operationally. With the $6.5B acquisition of Ampere plus Arm and Graphcore, SoftBank aims to control the core AI building blocks itself.
š§ Ā Google pressure: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, one of the strongest ChatGPT advocates in Silicon Valley, announced on Sunday that he is ditching OpenAIās chatbot after a brief test of Googleās latest Gemini 3.
šĀ Open(B)AI-(B)AI: Microsoft and Nvidia are backing Anthropic in parallel, while Google pushes prices and training costs down with its own chips. OpenAI remains technologically strong, but now faces massive price and margin pressure from all sides.
Big Picture
With its multi-billion-dollar bond financing, SoftBank is effectively betting on OpenAI becoming the dominant force of the AI era. At the same time, the market is shifting away from āchatbot showcasesā toward fully multimodal systems deeply embedded into daily life ā across office suites, search, maps, video and mobile. This is exactly where Googleās ecosystem and deep integration give it structural advantages.
The China Survival Guide for Western Businesses
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