SoftBank Group Corp reported a decline in first-quarter profit, partly due to reduced earnings from its tech fund business, but overall results surpassed expectations as the value of its holdings in Intel and TikTok parent ByteDance surged.
The Japanese tech investment company revealed on Thursday that it recorded investment gains of 1.333 trillion yen (approximately $8.45 billion) on Intel shares, alongside $2.2 billion in gains from its ByteDance stake. In August 2025, SoftBank agreed to invest $2 billion in Intel at $23 per share. With Intel's recent trading price around $101, the value of SoftBank's stake in the U.S. chipmaker has been significantly boosted.
SoftBank's holdings in Intel are held separately from its Vision Fund, which owns stakes in OpenAI and other tech companies. The Vision Fund's profit fell sharply year-over-year, dragged down by valuation losses on investments like Symbotic, an AI-driven robotics warehouse automation company. The segment reported a profit of 5.43 billion yen, down from 451.39 billion yen in the same period last year, which had been lifted by returns from investments such as Coupang, an e-commerce firm.
According to SoftBank, the value of its stake in OpenAI, the developer of the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT, remained unchanged since the end of March. The Tokyo-based company booked $25 billion in investment gains in the January-to-March quarter. The firm added that its Vision Fund 2 plans to borrow $10 billion this month, using OpenAI shares as collateral.
Investors are closely monitoring SoftBank, balancing concerns over heavy financing for AI capital expenditures with hopes that these efforts will eventually generate a significant profit engine. SoftBank Chief Financial Officer Yoshimitsu Goto stated at a briefing on Thursday that there is an overwhelming supply shortage of data centers, and the progression of many projects is a positive development. "If we cannot secure this computing power, the growth pace of the AI technology industry will slow," he said.
The Japanese company has made multiple large-scale investments in OpenAI and plans to invest an additional $10 billion in October. This would bring SoftBank's total investment in OpenAI to $64.6 billion, representing an approximately 13% stake. In May of this year, SoftBank announced plans to build a $52 billion data center in France, leveraging the country's surplus nuclear power to diversify its data center footprint beyond the U.S. and Japan.
Last week, SoftBank-owned Arm Holdings reported a rise in first-quarter net profit, driven by continued demand for its chip designs in AI infrastructure and data centers. SoftBank's net profit for the three months ending June fell 18% year-over-year to 347.33 billion yen. This result still exceeded the 125.9 billion yen forecast from analysts surveyed by data provider Visible Alpha.
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