SoftBank Group announced it has completed an additional $22.5 billion investment in OpenAI, marking the second closing of its previously announced commitment to invest up to $40 billion and bringing the company’s total SoftBank-backed investment in the AI company to $30 billion. The second closing happened on December 26, 2025.
With the new funding, SoftBank said it has fully satisfied the commitment it made on March 31, 2025, and that the final funding round also included participation from third-party co-investors. SoftBank added that its aggregate ownership interest in OpenAI is now approximately 11%, underscoring the scale of its financial stake and the strategic importance it is placing on artificial intelligence as a core driver of long-term value creation.
The investment was executed through SoftBank Vision Fund 2 (SVF2), maintaining a consistent structure across both closings. SoftBank completed a first closing in April 2025, investing $7.5 billion through SVF2, and followed with a $22.5 billion second-closing investment through SVF2. Taken together, the two tranches represent $30.0 billion in SoftBank capital deployed into OpenAI under the March 2025 commitment.
SoftBank also highlighted the scale of external demand to participate alongside it. The company said third-party co-investors contributed an “oversubscribed and upsized” $11 billion, bringing the final aggregate commitment to $41.0 billion, which it said has now been fully funded. The overall structure, as described, indicates that the transaction expanded beyond the original headline commitment through additional third-party participation, reflecting strong investor appetite to back a leading AI platform at a time when capital requirements for frontier model development, computing infrastructure, and commercial deployment continue to rise.
The completion of the second closing represents a milestone for SoftBank as it continues to position itself as a central capital provider to AI development and deployment. The company’s framing emphasized alignment around the long-term trajectory of artificial general intelligence and its societal implications, while also signaling that SoftBank views OpenAI as a platform with global reach—one it believes can scale rapidly with the backing of large pools of capital and a network of strategic supporters.
In comments accompanying the announcement, SoftBank Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son emphasized a shared vision with OpenAI around ensuring AGI benefits broadly. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in turn, pointed to SoftBank’s early conviction around AI and argued that SoftBank’s scale and global leadership can help accelerate the pace of progress and distribution of advanced intelligence capabilities.
For OpenAI, the close of the investment commitment—combined with the additional third-party co-investment—strengthens its financial foundation as it advances the research, engineering, and operational infrastructure required to build and deploy increasingly capable AI systems. While the announcement did not detail specific spending plans, the language from leadership focused on speed, scale, and global impact, themes that typically map to expanded compute access, research headcount growth, model training and safety work, and broader commercialization efforts across enterprise and consumer products.
For SoftBank, the transaction further consolidates its role as one of the most prominent financial backers of a leading AI company, deepening a relationship that it is presenting not merely as financial sponsorship but as a strategic partnership. By completing the commitment and highlighting an approximate 11% ownership position, SoftBank is signaling it intends to remain closely connected to OpenAI’s trajectory and outcomes, and that it sees AI, particularly frontier AI, as a defining long-term investment theme.
The two-stage structure, an initial closing in April followed by the second closing in late December, also reflects how large private investments are often deployed in phases, allowing for governance, documentation, and co-investor participation to be finalized over time.
By year-end 2025, the completion of this funding will mark one of the most significant single-company financing commitments in the AI sector, underscoring both the intensifying competition to build advanced AI systems and the scale of capital being mobilized around companies viewed as leaders in that race. SoftBank’s statement and the accompanying executive remarks positioned the investment as part of a broader ambition to accelerate AI progress while emphasizing the importance of directing that progress toward widely shared benefits.
KEY QUOTES
“We are deeply aligned with OpenAI’s vision of ensuring AGI benefits all of humanity.”
Masayoshi Son, Chairman & CEO, SoftBank Group
“SoftBank saw the potential of AI early and committed with a deep belief in its impact on humanity. Their global leadership and scale help us move faster and bring advanced intelligence to the world.”
Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI
