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 can see that the Japanese group spends more than $ 40 billion on artificial intelligence initiatives with the start of the Microsoft -subsidized operation, According to To financial times.

The report said that the potential investment will make the largest individual supporter in SoftBank Openaii, bypassing Microsoft, who invested for the first time in the ChatGPT maker in 2019. The deal comes after the two companies announced last week that it would be up Invested jointly 100 billion dollars in StargateOpenai’s US data center project can expand to $ 500 billion over a period of four years.

The report said that Softbank plans to invest $ 15 billion to $ 25 billion 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” model, which was built on a relatively modest budget, public markets this week.

NVIDIA, the chips giant, lost up to $ 589 billion a day before a slight recovery, as investors worried that large investments in the expensive artificial intelligence devices may not be necessary if companies can achieve similar results with lower resources.

Openai claimed earlier this week that he found evidence that Deepseek used royal Openai models to train R1 and other models through a technology called “distillation”, which allows developers to achieve similar performance with a much smaller cost models. 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 obtain computing resources, with microsoft The recent agreement to surrender Its location as an exclusive cloud provider for 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.