- SoftBank Group is in discussions to invest up to $30 billion more in OpenAI, reinforcing its status as a dominant backer in the generative AI landscape.
- The potential funding forms part of a broader $100 billion round, underscoring how capital concentration continues to rise around core AI models and infrastructure.
What happened: SoftBank deepens commitment to OpenAI with talks on $30bn investment
Japanese investment powerhouse SoftBank Group Corp is in negotiations to commit up to $30 billion more to OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT and other leading generative AI models, according to sources familiar with the matter on 27 January, 2026.
The discussions centre on a funding round that could raise as much as $100 billion for OpenAI, potentially valuing the company at around $830 billion if fully subscribed. SoftBank’s prospective commitment builds on earlier injections of capital, which brought its stake in the AI developer to roughly 11 per cent by the end of 2025.
OpenAI has been absorbing significant capital to support the escalating cost of training and running its large language models — particularly as competition intensifies from companies such as Google and other cloud and AI leaders. The need for funding is linked directly to the substantial compute, talent and infrastructure requirements that underpin frontier AI development.
Neither SoftBank nor OpenAI has publicly commented on the ongoing talks, and terms remain fluid. Shares of SoftBank ticked higher on market reaction to the news as investors weighed the strategic implications of such a large injection into a generative AI powerhouse.
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Why it’s important
For technology enterprises and infrastructure investors, this development illustrates an accelerating trend: capital concentration around a small number of foundational AI platforms continues to rise, with generative AI moving away from a fragmented startup landscape to a competitive axis dominated by a few deep-pocketed entities.
SoftBank’s potential investment — part of a funding round dwarfing most private tech financings in history — reinforces the idea that models like OpenAI’s are evolving into “infrastructure-level platforms” akin to cloud providers or operating systems. This dynamic matters for suppliers of compute, networking and data centre hardware, for cloud partners seeking to integrate AI services, and for enterprise adopters who ultimately depend on the stability, scalability and governance of these core platforms. Higher capital concentration also raises strategic questions about influence over AI development direction, ecosystem lock-in and competitive balance with peers such as Anthropic, Microsoft and Google.
In this context, OpenAI’s fundraising trajectory becomes a bellwether for where next-generation enterprise technology ecosystems are headed — not just in terms of features, but in the financial and infrastructure underpinnings of the AI era.
