SoftBank Group (SFTBF +1.06%) this week revealed it sold its entire Nvidia (NVDA +1.68%) stake in October, some 32.1 million shares for a total of $5.83 billion.
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Key Data Points
SoftBank is a Japanese holding company that focuses on investment management. It invests in public and private businesses through its venture capital funds. The company's Vision Fund is the world's largest venture capital fund focused on technology. And as of the end of September, Nvidia accounted for 19.3% of SoftBank's portfolio.
SoftBank CFO Yoshimitsu Goto said the October sale had nothing to do with Nvidia itself. Instead, the company made several large divestments in the quarter, including the sale of $9.2 billion in shares of T-Mobile US, to raise money for other artificial intelligence (AI)-related investments.
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SoftBank has new AI investment needs
SoftBank began acquiring its stake in Nvidia back in 2020, before the rollout of OpenAI's ChatGPT started the price rally in shares of Nvidia and other AI-related companies. Share prices of Nvidia are up 1,339% over the past five years.
And now SoftBank is apparently moving on. SoftBank's financial filing said the company entered an agreement with OpenAI in March to invest an additional $30 billion in the company.
"This year our investment in OpenAI is large -- more than $30 billion needs to be made -- so for that we do need to divest our existing portfolios," said Goto. OpenAI is looking to develop human-level AI, also known as artificial general intelligence. The company owns ChatGPT, which has over 800 million weekly active users.
SoftBank is all in on AI
SoftBank founder, chairman, and CEO Masayoshi Son is going all in on AI. He says in a message on the company website that SoftBank's ultimate mission is "the evolution of humanity," and that the mission "will be accomplished through the realization of artificial super intelligence (ASI) -- AI that is ten thousand times more intelligent than human wisdom."
To that end, the holding company is heavily invested in AI companies. In addition to OpenAI, it owns stakes in China's ByteDance, another leader in AI technologies, and Perplexity AI, a rival to OpenAI, plus many other AI-related investments. Son's investments in AI have paid off in a big way. His net worth soared more than 240% this year, to $55 billion, which makes him Japan's wealthiest person.
Despite Goto's reassurance that the large divestment had nothing to do with Nvidia itself, shares of the AI chipmaker fell 3% during the day of the SoftBank announcement.
SoftBank's share price climbed about 3.6% the day of the announcement regarding its Nvidia shares. The stock price is up 129% so far in 2025.
