By Kosaku Narioka
SoftBank Group more than tripled its quarterly profit thanks to tens of billions of gains from its investment in OpenAI.
SoftBank said Wednesday that it booked $43.9 billion in gains related to its investment in the ChatGPT maker for the 12 months ended March. Gains from the OpenAI investment stood at about $25.1 billion for the latest quarter, given that it recorded about $18.8 billion in gains for the nine months ended December.
The Japanese company is one of OpenAI's largest shareholders.
The company in February agreed to invest an additional $30 billion in OpenAI in phases as part of the ChatGPT maker's recent funding round. That would bring SoftBank's total investment in OpenAI to $64.6 billion, representing a stake of about 13%.
"OpenAI's corporate value has been growing significantly as we expected," SoftBank Chief Financial Officer Yoshimitsu Goto said.
The Japanese technology investment company has issued debt, sold stakes in companies like Nvidia and Deutsche Telekom, and borrowed against its stake in U.K. chip-design unit Arm Holdings and other assets to fund bold AI investments.
SoftBank Group's payments app operator, PayPay, was listed on Nasdaq in March, a move that could further bolster the Japanese tech investor's coffers as it pours billions into AI.
In October, the Japanese company agreed to acquire Swiss industrial giant ABB's robotics business for $5.4 billion, aiming to combine the potential of AI with robots.
Arm last week reported higher fiscal fourth-quarter profit and said it is seeing rampant demand for its new computer chips.
SoftBank Group's stock has climbed 37% so far this year as artificial-intelligence-related stocks lead a recovery from the market rout triggered by the Iran war. Investors have also turned to SoftBank as one of the few publicly traded stocks available with a large exposure to OpenAI.
Shares had fallen earlier this year as OpenAI rival Anthropic emerged as a key AI provider for businesses, driven in part by the viral success of its coding and AI agent products.
The Japanese technology investment company's net profit soared to 1.83 trillion yen, equivalent to $11.61 billion, for the three months ended March, from Y517.18 billion in the year-earlier period.
Write to Kosaku Narioka at kosaku.narioka@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 13, 2026 06:53 ET (10:53 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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