SoftBank Group Corp. has auctioned off its entire Nvidia stake for a cool $5.83 billion, channeling the windfall straight into what founder Masayoshi Son grandly calls the future of everything – or, more plainly, a swarm of AI projects that could either revolutionize the world or just crash spectacularly like a toddler on a sugar rush.
This isn’t Son’s first rodeo with Nvidia stock; he dumped it all in 2019, only to sneak back in 2020 with pocket change bets that ballooned into a $3 billion treasure chest by March, thanks to the chipmaker’s meteoric rise. Now, with Nvidia’s shares dipping 1.3% in pre-market jitters, SoftBank’s exit feels like cashing in chips right before the casino roulette wheel spins wild.
Picture Masayoshi Son, the billionaire visionary with a knack for turning “moonshot” into “money pit,” eyeing his next conquests: the colossal Stargate data centers and AI robot factories sprouting across the U.S. like tech-infused mushrooms after a rain of venture capital.
He’s not just investing; he’s courting presidents, schmoozing chip titans from Taiwan Semiconductor to South Korean moguls, and even flirting with a Marvell Technology takeover earlier this year – because why stop at buying companies when you can woo entire industries?
Yet amid the glamour, whispers of an AI investment bubble swell louder than a poorly tuned chatbot’s small talk. Big tech behemoths like Meta and Alphabet are poised to splash over $1 trillion on this silicon sorcery in the coming years, prompting analysts to ponder if the returns will match the hype or merely fund another round of executive yacht upgrades.
SoftBank’s CFO Yoshimitsu Goto shrugged off bubble talk with a masterful non-answer: “I can’t say if we’re in an AI bubble or not.” Translation: We’re all in, folks – hold onto your hoverboards.
The sale, Goto insisted, had zilch to do with Nvidia’s glow dimming; it was purely a liquidity lifeline for SoftBank’s feverish deal-making.
And feverish it is: the firm just greenlit a full $22.5 billion pour into OpenAI sans strings attached, snapped up Ampere Computing for $6.5 billion, and gobbled ABB’s robotics arm for $5.4 billion – because nothing says “balanced portfolio” like betting the farm on machines that might one day write their own pink slips.
SoftBank’s financial acrobatics shine brighter than a freshly minted GPU: they juiced a margin loan on Arm Holdings shares to $20 billion (with $11.5 billion still lounging in the bank), snagged an $8.5 billion bridge loan for OpenAI, and another for Ampere. It’s like refinancing your dream house to buy a fleet of self-driving Lamborghinis – risky, but oh so exhilarating when the engine purrs.
This Nvidia rally, paired with OpenAI’s value skyrocketing $14.6 billion since SoftBank’s bet, catapulted the company to a jaw-dropping ¥2.5 trillion ($16.2 billion) net income in its fiscal second quarter – obliterating analyst guesses by a factor that would make even a supercomputer blush.
Bloomberg Intelligence’s Kirk Boodry calls it SoftBank’s highest annual profit since 2020, crediting the $5.8 billion Nvidia haul for greasing the wheels of Son’s AI odyssey. Shares surged 78% in the three months to September, the best sprint since 2005, prompting a cheeky 4-for-1 stock split come January 1 to lure in everyday Japanese investors who might otherwise stick to safer bets like stamp collecting.
Son’s trophy case gleams with AI darlings: OpenAI, ByteDance, Perplexity AI – names that sound like a sci-fi novel’s cast list. It’s propped up SoftBank’s bottom line like a caffeinated barista on deadline, but the real tightrope walk lies ahead: juggling this deal deluge without toppling into overleveraged oblivion.
As Finimize Research quipped in a pre-earnings note, SoftBank was once the bargain-bin ticket to Arm and AI riches – shares more than doubled, outpacing net asset value like a hare mocking a tortoise. Now, with the discount vanished, it’s time to cash out and toast to the chaos.
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