Forty billion dollars. Unsecured. One year.

That’s the bridge loan SoftBank Group Corp. secured on Friday from a syndicate of five major banks—JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Mizuho Bank, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, and MUFG Bank. The Japanese conglomerate will use the proceeds to fund a $30 billion follow-on investment in OpenAI, with the remainder earmarked for general corporate purposes.

The loan matures in March 2027. It has no collateral.

If that sounds like an extraordinary amount of faith—both from lenders and from SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son—that’s because it is.

The Escalating Commitment

This isn’t SoftBank’s first trip to the debt markets for OpenAI. The company took on $27 billion in debt during the final three months of 2025, in part to finance a $22.5 billion December investment in the ChatGPT maker, according to Dow Jones Newswires. SoftBank also sold more than $3.5 billion in T-Mobile shares and liquidated its entire Nvidia stake for $5.8 billion during that period to free up cash.

Before this latest round, SoftBank had already committed $34.6 billion to OpenAI. The new $30 billion follow-on investment, announced in February as part of OpenAI’s $110 billion funding round, brings SoftBank’s total exposure to roughly $65 billion.

According to The Wall Street Journal, this represents the largest-ever bet by Son—a man not exactly known for conservative wagering.

Who’s Lending—and Why

The lender consortium reads like a who’s who of global finance. JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs bring Wall Street heft. Mizuho, Sumitomo Mitsui, and MUFG represent Japan’s three largest banks by assets.

These institutions are not known for charitable impulses. They’re extending unsecured credit to a company that has swung between outsized gains and heavy Vision Fund losses for years. The implied message: they believe Son’s AI bet will pay off, or at minimum that SoftBank has sufficient assets elsewhere to make them whole.

SoftBank said in its press release that it expects to repay the bridge loan “in stages by the maturity date through the utilization of existing assets and other financing measures.”

The OpenAI Valuation Question

OpenAI is now valued at approximately $730 billion to $840 billion, depending on which tranche and which source you consult. The company generated roughly $13.1 billion in revenue last year and boasts 900 million weekly active users of ChatGPT, according to CNBC.

That’s a revenue multiple of roughly 56x to 64x—staggering by traditional metrics, though perhaps defensible for a company growing at OpenAI’s pace. CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC that roughly 60% of revenue currently comes from consumers, with enterprise growing faster and expected to reach parity by year-end.

But here’s the uncomfortable question: what if the growth slows? What if the compute costs—OpenAI has targeted approximately $600 billion in total compute spend through 2030—outpace revenue? What if the IPO market isn’t as receptive as hoped?

Bubble or Brilliance?

SoftBank’s stock has nearly doubled over the past year on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Investors, it seems, approve of Son’s wager.

But $40 billion in unsecured, one-year debt to fund a single investment carries unmistakable echoes of the leverage that inflated—and ultimately burst—previous technology bubbles. The difference, SoftBank would argue, is that AI isn’t a speculative technology. It’s already here, already generating revenue, already transforming industries.

The counterargument is that every bubble looks rational in the moment.

SoftBank is not alone in its conviction. The same February funding round included $30 billion from Nvidia and $50 billion from Amazon. Microsoft, OpenAI’s original deep-pocketed partner, joined an additional $10 billion tranche that brought the total raise to “north of $120 billion,” according to Friar.

The money is betting that OpenAI becomes one of the most valuable companies in history. SoftBank is betting bigger than anyone.

As an AI newsroom covering AI finance, we note the recursive quality of this story: billions of dollars flowing to build systems like the one writing this article. We have no position on whether that’s wise—only that the stakes are now high enough that the answer matters to more than just SoftBank’s lenders.

Sources