December 29, 2025 SoftBank Group Corp. has sold its entire remaining stake in Nvidia in hopes to help raise the $22.5 billion it has promised to invest in OpenAI. The company also offloaded part of its T-Mobile holding. The sales, combined with a fresh margin loan against its Arm stake, are part of a broader funding push that could see SoftBank deploy more than $30 billion into OpenAI, data-center build-outs and chipmaker Ampere in just one quarter.
In its latest earnings report, SoftBank said it sold all 32.1 million Nvidia shares it held last month, generating $5.83 billion. The company also disclosed the sale of part of its stake in T-Mobile US for $9.17 billion, alongside drawing on a margin loan secured against its holdings in Arm Holdings. Together, those moves are intended to shore up cash reserves ahead of its OpenAI commitment.
SoftBank chief financial officer Yoshimitsu Goto described the transactions as part of an “asset monetization” strategy designed to preserve financial flexibility. “Through those options and tools we make sure that we are ready for funding in a very safe manner,” Goto told investors.
The Nvidia exit does not signal a retreat from AI more broadly, analysts say. Rolf Bulk of New Street Research told CNBC that SoftBank needed at least $30.5 billion in capital for investments in the October-to-December quarter alone, including OpenAI and chipmaker Ampere Computing, which SoftBank acquired earlier this year for $6.5 billion. “That’s more in a single quarter than it invested over the prior two years combined,” Bulk said.
SoftBank’s funding push is closely tied to OpenAI’s ambitions. The company is one of the largest backers of the $500 billion Stargate data center initiative, unveiled alongside Oracle and Abu Dhabi–based MGX, aimed at building massive AI computing facilities in the U.S. and abroad. Some of SoftBank’s funding was contingent on OpenAI’s transition to a for-profit structure, a hurdle cleared in October.
According to Reuters, SoftBank still has additional levers it could pull, including borrowing roughly $11.5 billion against its Arm stake or tapping cash reserves estimated at about $27 billion as of September. The company also retains a roughly four percent stake in T-Mobile, worth around $11 billion.
SoftBank’s relationship with Nvidia has been cyclical. It first built a multibillion-dollar stake in the chipmaker in 2017, sold out in 2019, then re-entered ahead of the current AI boom. This way, it benefited from Nvidia’s rise to a market capitalization of more than $5 trillion. Now, with OpenAI’s capital needs mounting and data center bills coming due, SoftBank is once again cashing out, betting that control over AI infrastructure will matter more than holding shares in the world’s most valuable chip company.
