SoftBank lines up $11.87 billion loan as it races to refinance its OpenAI bet

SoftBank Group Corp. has secured an $11.87 billion two-year loan from a syndicate of roughly 20 banks, upsizing the facility from an initial $10 billion target, as the Japanese conglomerate scrambles to refinance the debt behind its expanding investment in OpenAI. Bloomberg reported the facility was sealed in the second week of September, and The Japan Times confirmed the terms with people familiar with the arrangement.

The new loan lands in the middle of one of the busiest financing weeks in SoftBank's history. On September 15, the company is repaying the remaining $25.9 billion balance on a $40 billion unsecured bridge loan it drew down in March, well ahead of that facility's March 2027 maturity. At the same time, SoftBank executives, led by chief financial officer Yoshimitsu Goto, have been meeting fixed-income investors in New York from September 14 to 17 to gauge appetite for a dollar- and potentially euro-denominated bond sale of $10 billion to $20 billion — a deal that would reportedly mark the company's first use of the 144A format in more than a decade. Combined with a freshly placed ¥1 trillion (roughly $6.5 billion) seven-year retail bond carrying a 4.75% coupon that settles September 17, SoftBank has raised the equivalent of about $37 billion in bonds and loans so far this year.

A loan stack built on OpenAI's shares

The $11.87 billion facility is distinct from — and stacks on top of — a separate $10 billion margin loan SoftBank secured in August that is directly collateralized by its OpenAI preferred shares, priced at roughly SOFR plus 425 basis points and arranged with Goldman Sachs Bank USA, JPMorgan Chase Bank NA, Mizuho Securities USA, Apollo Global Funding and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp. That spread compares with the 150 basis points over Libor SoftBank paid when it borrowed against its publicly traded Alibaba stake in 2018, reflecting the far higher risk premium lenders attach to a private, thinly traded collateral asset. The $40 billion bridge facility being retired this week was itself executed in March with JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Mizuho Bank, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp and MUFG Bank, unsecured and specifically earmarked to fund SoftBank's OpenAI follow-on commitment.

How SoftBank's OpenAI exposure got this large

The borrowing binge traces back to a definitive agreement SoftBank announced on February 27, committing $30 billion in follow-on investment in OpenAI Group PBC through SoftBank Vision Fund 2, split into three equal $10 billion tranches at a pre-money valuation of $730 billion, with the first tranche funded on April 1, the second on July 1, and the third due October 1. Layered on top of roughly $34.6 billion SoftBank had already invested in OpenAI since September 2024, the deal is set to lift SoftBank's cumulative OpenAI stake to about $64.6 billion — close to 13% of the company — once the final tranche closes next month. SoftBank's OpenAI bet sits alongside its role in the Stargate project, the $500 billion U.S. AI data-center buildout announced in January 2025 in which SoftBank and OpenAI are lead partners alongside Oracle and the Abu Dhabi-backed investor MGX, adding further capital demands on top of the equity commitment itself.

In its own announcement of the OpenAI follow-on round, SoftBank quoted founder and chief executive Masayoshi Son saying the investment was designed to "accelerate OpenAI's research and ecosystem expansion, while advancing our own ASI strategy" — a reference to Son's stated ambition of using SoftBank's balance sheet to help fund a race toward artificial superintelligence. Son has repeatedly waved off suggestions that the spending amounts to speculative excess; at SoftBank's annual shareholder meeting in June, he told attendees, according to Bloomberg, "I think it's blasphemy against AI if you say it's a bubble."

Who is exposed, and how markets reacted

The financing structure spreads risk across a wide set of counterparties: the roughly 20 banks in the new syndicate, the five lenders behind the OpenAI-collateralized margin loan, the banks retiring the bridge facility, prospective dollar-bond buyers being courted in New York this week, and tens of thousands of Japanese retail investors who bought into the yen bond. S&P Global Ratings revised its outlook on SoftBank Group to negative from stable in March, while affirming its BB+ issuer rating — a speculative-grade, or "junk," rating — citing the strain the OpenAI commitments could place on liquidity and on the credit quality of a portfolio SoftBank itself flagged as increasingly weighted toward unlisted, early-stage assets; S&P subsequently returned the outlook to stable in July. Moody's separately holds an unsolicited Ba2 senior unsecured rating on the company. SoftBank's standalone interest-bearing debt stood at roughly ¥16.3 trillion, or about $104 billion, at the end of 2025, with a loan-to-value ratio management has put at around 19%.

Shares in SoftBank fell as much as 13% in Tokyo trading on September 14, their steepest one-day drop since July 17, as investors weighed the scale of the new borrowing against fresh unease about the pace of AI development. The sell-off was amplified by statements from OpenAI and Anthropic executives calling for more caution in deploying advanced models following recent security incidents, and by comments from OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman that the company would not pursue a public listing this year, removing a near-term path for investors including SoftBank to realize returns on their preferred-share stakes.

"A bond sale of this size could significantly reduce SoftBank's funding gap, though the company would likely have to offer higher borrowing costs," said Sharon Chen, a credit analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, adding that the shortfall may still exceed $20 billion even after a successful offering, and that gross debt could climb above $130 billion from about $80 billion in March 2025 if SoftBank funds its remaining commitments entirely with debt.

What happens next

The immediate test is the New York roadshow: people familiar with the process say SoftBank is weighing a dollar tranche alongside a possible euro tranche, and pricing will be watched closely as an indicator of how credit investors are pricing AI-concentration risk after the stock's sharp reaction this week. SoftBank still owes the final $10 billion tranche of its OpenAI follow-on investment on October 1, meaning the company will need to keep tapping loan and bond markets even after this week's transactions close. Analysts covering the sale say the structure of the eventual bonds — secured or unsecured, and against what collateral — will be a key signal of how much further SoftBank can lean on debt markets to sustain its OpenAI and Stargate commitments without triggering a further ratings response.