Softbank in talks to invest up to $ 25 billion in Openai, says the report

SoftBank is holding up to $ 25 billion in Openai as part of a broader partnership that you can see the Japanese bloc spending more than $ 40 billion on artificial intelligence initiatives with the start of the Microsoft -subsidized operation, according to the Financial Times.

Possible investment will make the largest supporter in Openai, The report saidMicrosoft, which invested for the first time in the Chatgpt maker in 2019. The deal comes after the two companies announced last week that it will jointly invest $ 100 billion in Stargate, an American data center project that can expand to $ 500 billion over a period of four years.

The report said that Softbank plans to invest 15-25 billion dollars directly in Openai in addition to its commitment of $ 15 billion. Openai will invest about $ 15 billion in Stargate, with stocks in Softbank investing, which is likely to cover the infrastructure commitment to Openai.

The conversations come at a time when the Chinese company Deepseek has released the R1 thinking model, which was built with a relatively modest budget, and it shakes public markets this week.

NVIDIA, the chips giant, lost up to 589 billion dollars a day before they recover slightly, as investors worried that large investments in expensive AI devices may not be necessary if companies are able to achieve similar results with lower resources.

Openai claimed earlier this week that he found evidence that Deepseek used its own ownership models to train its open source opponent through a technology called “distillation”, which allows developers to achieve similar results on smaller models at a much lower cost. The company says that this would violate the conditions of its service, which prohibits the use of outputs to develop competing models.

The Openai deal with Softbank, which Financial Times says it has not ended, is the biggest bet of the founder of Softbank Masayoshi Son since the pumice of $ 16 billion in We was. It will also reduce Openai’s dependence on Microsoft to calculate resources, as Microsoft recently agrees to abandon its location as an exclusive cloud provider of Openai.

The report said that about 20 % of Stargit’s financing is expected to be stocks, as the rest was funded by guaranteed debts against assets and cash flow. Openai, which reached a rating of $ 157 billion last year, is negotiating to become a profitable company to facilitate additional donations.