SoftBank commits to joint venture with OpenAI

SoftBank has committed to spending $3 billion per year for itself and its subsidiaries to use OpenAI’s tech, according to a joint announcement on Monday.

The two also announced a new joint venture, billed as “SB OpenAI Japan,” which will market OpenAI’s enterprise tech exclusively to major companies in Japan.

The deal will give SoftBank and its subsidiaries access to ChatGPT Enterprise, OpenAI’s API, custom models and agent products such as Operator, which it describes as “an agent that can go to the web to perform tasks for you,” such as planning vacations and filling out forms. It also will include access to OpenAI’s newest agent feature, once it launches: a tool called “Deep Research” which OpenAI says will be able to conduct multi-step analysis on the web. SoftBank branded all the OpenAI products it will use as a suite of tools “Cristal Intelligence.”

Arm, the British chip designer acquired by SoftBank in 2016, will also use OpenAI tools to “boost productivity across the company,” according to the announcement.

At a livestreamed event early Monday morning, which was jointly held by SoftBank, SoftBank Group, OpenAI and Arm, executives in the audience represented companies that collectively accounted for more than half of Japan’s total market capitalization, according to SoftBank.

During the presentation, Son said that he believes artificial general intelligence, or AGI — a vaguely defined benchmark referring to AI that equals or surpasses human intellect on a wide range of tasks — will be a reality in fewer than 10 years.

Son said via a translator that he believes “AGI can be achieved in large enterprise businesses first,” adding that to achieve it, “quite the huge amount of money is necessary” and that such funds are “only available in large enterprises at the moment.” 

News of SoftBank and OpenAI’s strategic partnership comes days after CNBC confirmed that OpenAI is in talks to raise up to $40 billion in a funding round led by Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank at a valuation of up to $340 billion.

SoftBank would contribute between $15 billion and $25 billion, according to two people familiar with the negotiations who asked not to be named because the talks are ongoing. If the round were completed, SoftBank would surpass Microsoft as OpenAI’s top backer.

Part of the funding may be used for OpenAI’s commitment to Stargate, a joint venture between SoftBank, OpenAI and Oracle that was introduced by President Donald Trump last week, the sources said. The plan calls for billions of dollars to be invested in U.S. AI infrastructure.

During the presentation Monday morning, Son said he was looking forward to working with OpenAI, Oracle and others on the Stargate project.

OpenAI was last valued at $157 billion by private investors. In late 2022, the company launched its ChatGPT chatbot, kicking off a boom in generative AI. OpenAI closed its latest $6.6 billion round in October, gearing up to aggressively compete with Elon Musk’s xAI, as well as Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Anthropic.

Meanwhile, Chinese startup lab DeepSeek has gone viral in the U.S, presenting fresh competition to OpenAI. DeepSeek saw its app soar to the top of Apple’s App Store rankings this week and roiled U.S. markets on reports that its powerful model was trained at a fraction of the cost of U.S. competitors.

At an event in Washington, D.C. on Thursday hosted by OpenAI, CEO Sam Altman said DeepSeek is “clearly a great model.”

“This is a reminder of the level of competition and the need for democratic Al to win,” he said. He said it also points to the “level of interest in reasoning, the level of interest in open source.”