A second hundred billion from the Gulf

Masayoshi Son, the chief executive of SoftBank Group, is seeking to raise as much as $100bn from Gulf investors to fund a new wave of artificial intelligence investments, the Financial Times reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. Son has held discussions in recent weeks with senior figures, including in the United Arab Emirates, according to Reuters' account of the report.

The money would not go into chips or models directly. SoftBank would use the proceeds to set up a fund that would acquire companies and improve their operations using AI and other advanced technologies, Reuters said. The FT said the fund would use machines including those from Roze, SoftBank's robotics arm, according to Bloomberg's account carried by The Japan Times, which described the talks as early.

Neither the size nor the talks have been confirmed. Reuters said it could not immediately verify the report and that SoftBank did not respond to a request for comment. A SoftBank representative declined to comment to Bloomberg.

The number has a history. In 2017 Son obtained commitments of nearly $100bn for the first Vision Fund, much of it from Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and Abu Dhabi's Mubadala, Bloomberg noted. That fund's record has been mixed: it backed winners such as ByteDance and high-profile failures such as WeWork. A second approach of the same size would go to a region that is grappling with the threat of economic contraction from the Iran war, now in its eighth month, according to Bloomberg.

SoftBank's own balance sheet is already committed to one company. It has invested almost $65bn in OpenAI, Bloomberg said. Last week SoftBank said it had completed its $30bn investment in OpenAI's last fundraising round, and last month it raised $11.1bn in the largest high-yield corporate bond sale in the world to help pay for that bet, Reuters reported. By our arithmetic, the fund Son is reported to be seeking would be about one and a half times what SoftBank has put into OpenAI. Bloomberg said the company is grappling with growing borrowing costs while OpenAI has pushed back its listing.

The markets were already nervous about that exposure. SoftBank shares dropped as much as 7.3 per cent in Tokyo on Friday, weighed by concerns over the pace of OpenAI's revenue growth, Bloomberg reported. On Thursday the FT reported that OpenAI had told investors its annualised revenue was approaching $50bn, about $20bn below the figure that had been in circulation.

Son would also be asking at a crowded moment. OpenAI is trying to raise another $30bn in a new financing at a valuation of around $1.4tn, and is in talks with investment funds including MGX, Abu Dhabi's state-backed AI investor, to help anchor the round, according to Bloomberg. That would be well above the $852bn valuation of the $122bn round it closed in March, Komposite reported on Thursday, citing Yahoo Finance and SiliconANGLE. MGX is also a partner, with SoftBank, OpenAI and Oracle, in the $500bn US data centre project announced in 2025, which Bloomberg said has yet to yield material progress.

SoftBank has other ways to raise money in the pipeline. It plans to take Roze public in the US, and SB Energy, the unit building an 8.8-gigawatt data centre facility in Ohio, is preparing to list on the Nasdaq, Bloomberg reported. Son has forecast large returns from AI, including from machines that handle real-world objects. The fund he is reported to be planning would put that forecast to work with outside money.