SoftBank is in conversations to invest up to $ 25 billion in Openai as part of a broader association that could see that the Japanese conglomerate spends more than $ 40 billion in artificial intelligence initiatives with the startup backed by Microsoft, according to financial times.
The potential investment would cause the best sponsor of SoftBank OpenAi They would jointly invest $ 100 billion in Stargate, a data center in the United States. OPENAI project that could expand to $ 500 billion in four years.
SoftBank plans to invest $ 15 billion to $ 25 billion directly in Operai, in addition to its Stargate commitment of $ 15 billion, according to the report. Operai will invest around $ 15 billion in Stargate, with the capital investment of SoftBank that potentially covers Openai’s infrastructure commitment.
The conversations arrive at a time when the release of the Chinese firm Depseek of its “Reasoning” model R1, which was based on a relatively modest budget, shook public markets this week.
The Nvidia chips giant lost up to $ 589 billion in a day before recovering a light, since investors were concerned that large investments in expensive hardware were not necessary if companies could achieve similar results with less resources.
Operai said at the beginning of this week that he had found evidence that Depseek used Openai patented models to train R1 and other models through a technique called “distillation”, which allows developers to achieve similar performance with smaller models to A much lower cost. The company says that this would violate its terms of service, which prohibits the use of results to develop competitors.
The OpenAI agreement with SoftBank, which according to Financial Times has not ended, represents the biggest commitment of the founder of Softbank Masayoshi are since it injected $ 16 billion in Wework. It would also reduce the Microsoft OpenAi dependence to calculate resources, with Microsoft recently agreed to give up its position as the OpenAI exclusive cloud supplier.
It is expected that about 20% of Stargate funds will be capital, with the rest financed through the insured debt against assets and cash flow, according to the report. Openai, which reached an assessment of $ 157 billion last year, is also negotiating to become a profit company to facilitate the collection of additional funds.