SoftBank races to fulfill $22.5 billion funding pledge to OpenAI by year-end SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son attends an event to pitch AI for businesses in Tokyo in February. NEW YORK/TOKYO/SAN FRANCISCO - SoftBank Group is racing to close a $22.5 billion funding commitment to OpenAI by year-end through an array of cash-raising plans, including a sale of some investments, and could tap its undrawn margin loans borrowed against its valuable ownership in chip firm Arm Holdings, sources said. The all-in bet on OpenAI is among the biggest yet by SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, as the Japanese billionaire seeks to improve his firm's position in the race for artificial intelligence. To come up with the money, Son has already sold SoftBank's entire $5.8 billion stake in AI chip leader Nvidia, offloaded $4.8 billion of its T-Mobile U.S. stake and slashed staff. Son has slowed most other dealmaking at SoftBank's Vision Fund to a crawl, and any deal above $50 million now requires his explicit approval, two of the sources said.

SoftBank's Vision Fund mulls 20% job cuts after Son's pivot to AI SoftBank Group's Vision Fund is considering cutting as much as 20% of its staff. SoftBank Group's Vision Fund is considering cutting as much as 20% of its staff, a person familiar with the matter said, underscoring a shift in CEO Masayoshi Son's focus to ambitious bets on artificial intelligence. The unit, which employed about 282 people as of the end of March, may shed more than 50 roles, the person said, asking not to be identified discussing private deliberations. The reduction extends years of cutbacks as the Vision Fund unit shrank in importance next to Son's growing appetite for big AI bets. Those include a plan to invest about $30 billion in OpenAI and a $6.5 billion deal to acquire chip designer Ampere Computing, which faces regulatory scrutiny.

SoftBank Group is building up stakes in Nvidia and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, the latest reflection of Masayoshi Son's focus on the tools and hardware underpinning artificial intelligence. The Japanese technology investor raised its stake in Nvidia to about 3 billion by the end of March, up from 1 billion in the prior quarter, according to regulatory filings. It bought around 330 million worth of TSMC shares and 170 million in Oracle, they show. That's while SoftBank's signature Vision Fund has monetized almost 2 billion of public and private assets in the first half of 2025, according to a person familiar with the fund's activities. The Vision Fund prioritizes its returns on investment, and there is no particular pressure from SoftBank to monetize its assets, said the person, who asked not to be named discussing private information.

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SoftBank Group Corp. CEO Masayoshi Son said Wednesday that the company will bolster its investment business in a shift in the telecommunications giant's growth strategy. "I have used 97 percent of my brain to consider the telecom businesses, but will shift that to investments," Son said at a meeting with more than 2,300 shareholders in Tokyo. Son, one of most influential investors in the technology industry, said his company will strengthen its focus on investments in startup ventures possessing artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge technologies through its $100 billion Vision Fund, which was set up last year with partners such as Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund. "We are the unicorn hunter," Son said, referring to unlisted startups valued at more than $1 billion. Among its recent investment projects, SoftBank has taken a stake in ride-hailing service provider Uber Technologies Inc. and has also bought U.S.-based robotics company Boston Dynamics.

Speaking on a panel at Dreamforce in San Francisco, Paul Daugherty said he believed there was "tremendous substance" behind the hype around AI. "We've never seen a technology that's moved as fast as AI has to impact business and society," Daugherty said. "We believe this is by far the fastest-moving technology we've ever tracked, and we're just getting started." He referred to research that the consultancy giant recently carried out alongside Frontier Economics that suggested AI could deliver a 38% improvement in worker productivity by 2035, and add between $15tn (£11.4tn) and $20tn to the economic output of the world's 12 largest economies. Daugherty argued that the narrative of AI replacing human jobs was given too much emphasis. "It's easy to see jobs that are eliminated, such as long-haul truck drivers," he said.

But in the digital age, sometimes humor has a way of capturing national attention more easily than pulling on the public's heartstrings. That was certainly the case recently when the comedy website Funny or Die released a video to promote a new bill that had been introduced in the Senate called The Sexual Assault Survivors' Rights Act. The goal of the video was to shed light on the truly backwards laws that dictate states' treatment of assault survivors. And by all accounts, it worked. But the real measure of success came last month, when the Senate passed the bill unanimously. Soon it will reach the House of Representatives, where, Brad Jenkins, a former White House staffer and executive producer of Funny or Die DC, expects it to pass, as well.