SoftBank's deepening commitment to OpenAI is now raising questions inside the company, and the concern is less about conviction than concentration.
Masayoshi Son has spent the past year making one of the biggest public and financial commitments in SoftBank's history, but Bloomberg's latest reporting suggests some insiders are increasingly uneasy about how much of the group's AI story now runs through a single private company. That worry makes sense. OpenAI is still valued like a category leader, yet its long-term economics, governance structure and liquidity path are not settled in the way public-market investors are used to.
The latest reference point is huge. OpenAI said in March that it had closed a $122 billion funding round at an $852 billion post-money valuation, after earlier plans pointed to a $110 billion raise at a $730 billion pre-money valuation in February. SoftBank was one of the anchor investors in the completed March round, alongside Amazon, Nvidia and Microsoft, and the company's stake has become one of the defining positions behind Son's AI push.
That scale is exactly why the internal pushback matters. SoftBank is not just buying exposure to the AI wave in the abstract, it is tying a large part of its near-term narrative to OpenAI's ability to keep growing fast enough to justify an extraordinary valuation. Bloomberg's Big Take Asia podcast on May 19 framed Son's exposure as a roughly $60 billion bet on OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, a figure that captures how central the relationship has become to the firm's identity.
The criticism is not that OpenAI is unimportant. It is that a single private company now sits at the center of a strategy that also includes the Stargate infrastructure project, where SoftBank is one of the founding partners and Son serves as chairman. SoftBank's January announcement described Stargate as a plan to invest $500 billion over four years in AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States, with $100 billion to be deployed immediately.
That kind of concentration creates a very specific risk profile. If OpenAI keeps rising in value, the bet looks bold and prescient. If the market cools, or if the company's revenue growth lags the spending required to build model capacity and compute infrastructure, SoftBank could be left with a highly visible anchor position in an asset that is still hard to value on traditional metrics. Bloomberg's latest reporting lands at exactly that tension point, where enthusiasm for AI is still high but confidence in every large private valuation is no longer automatic.
There is also the liquidity question. SoftBank has reportedly already had to rethink financing around its OpenAI position. Bloomberg reported on May 8 that the company cut its target for a margin loan backed by the OpenAI stake to $6 billion from an original $10 billion plan after lenders showed hesitation, a sign that even creditors are taking a harder look at the structure of the bet.
The market is getting less forgiving
OpenAI's own fundraising makes the broader backdrop clear. The company is still attracting enormous capital, but the market is also asking tougher questions about how fast that capital can be converted into durable cash flow. Reuters reported in April that investors were scrutinizing OpenAI's $852 billion valuation amid strategy shifts, while commentary across the sector has focused on whether the company can sustain the spending required to stay ahead in model training, deployment and infrastructure.
That is where SoftBank's position becomes more than a single-company story. For institutional investors watching the AI cycle, Son's approach is a live case study in what happens when conviction meets scale. He is effectively choosing to underwrite the frontier of private AI at a moment when the frontier is still expensive, opaque and heavily dependent on future monetization that nobody can yet prove at this size.
SoftBank's own recent results have reinforced why the bet is politically powerful inside the company. Bloomberg reported on May 13 that SoftBank's profit jumped on valuation gains tied to OpenAI, which strengthens Son's hand just as concerns about the size of the exposure are surfacing. That is the awkward reality of the trade. The upside is already visible in the numbers, which makes it harder to argue against further commitment even as the structural risks remain unresolved.
For founders, the message is straightforward. The AI market is still rewarding speed, scale and narrative, but the bar for capital discipline is rising. SoftBank's OpenAI exposure shows what happens when one of the world's most aggressive tech investors decides the future is worth concentrating in a single bet. Bloomberg's reporting suggests some people inside the firm are no longer fully comfortable with that logic, and that skepticism may be one of the clearest signs yet that the AI cycle is entering a more demanding phase.
Also read: OpenAI picks Singapore for its first applied AI lab outside the US • Alibaba's new AI chip sharpens its challenge to Nvidia • Google and Volvo push Gemini into the driver's seat
