New $11.87 billion loan: SoftBank deepens its OpenAI bet amid market turmoil

New $11.87 billion loan: SoftBank deepens its OpenAI bet amid market turmoil

The loan was negotiated the same week SoftBank's shares fell sharply, OpenAI has delayed its listing plans, and the company is weighing a further $10–20 billion in junk bonds.

SoftBank Group has secured a loan of $11.87 billion from around 20 banks to finance its investments in OpenAI, Bloomberg reports via The Japan Times. The amount was upsized from an earlier target of $10 billion, and the two-year loan was sealed last week, according to people familiar with the matter who are said to be unauthorized to speak publicly. SoftBank itself has not commented on the reports.

That means the company, founded and led by Masayoshi Son, is raising new debt at a moment when both credit and safety questions are casting a shadow over the AI sector.

Bad timing on the stock market

On Monday, September 14, SoftBank's shares fell as much as 13 percent, the worst since July 17, according to Bloomberg's report via The Japan Times. Bloomberg links the fall to the fact that the heads of Anthropic and OpenAI have endorsed a safety-based slowdown of AI development — but it is worth noting that this connection is primarily Bloomberg's interpretation, not a documented causal relationship.

The fall was not limited to SoftBank. Stocks tied to the AI boom fell broadly on Monday: Nvidia ended down 3.4 percent, and the PHLX semiconductor index sank almost 6 percent — the worst day since the beginning of July, according to CNN's market coverage.

The stock turmoil came the same week that OpenAI tightened the timeline for a possible listing. In a Fortune interview cited by TechCrunch on September 12 — two days before the loan report — Sam Altman said the company will not rush to go public in 2026. "We're not rushing into an IPO," Altman said, adding: "I actually think that given everything that's going on with safety, it would be an ill-advised moment to go public." The statements are reproduced in secondhand sources, and the original interview is not available for verification. That Altman pointed to the safety situation as an argument against a listing immediately before the loan report, and that AI stocks fell the Monday after, is chronologically fact — but whether the market reacted to the warnings, to the financing picture, or to something else entirely, is not documented.

The debt picture around the OpenAI investment

SoftBank is, according to Bloomberg, set to invest close to $65 billion in OpenAI by October, and has already this year raised the equivalent of around $37 billion through bond sales and loans, both offshore and in Japan, including the new loan, according to Bloomberg-compiled data.

The new loan is thus not an isolated transaction, but one of several layers in the financing of the OpenAI commitment:

• New two-year loan: $11.87 billion over two years from around 20 banks (upsized from $10 billion), according to anonymous sources cited by Bloomberg.
• Earlier $40 billion loan: SoftBank stated last week, in a statement quoted by Bloomberg, that the company plans to repay the $25.9 billion it owes on the loan on September 15. The loan was taken up earlier this year to finance the OpenAI investment.
• Margin loan: A $10 billion loan in which the OpenAI stake serves as collateral. That means the value of the OpenAI holding itself is already leveraged.
• Possible bond loan: SoftBank has scheduled investor meetings in New York this week to gauge interest in a US dollar-denominated junk bond in the range of $10–20 billion, according to people familiar with the matter whom Bloomberg cited last month.

Bloomberg describes the background for the new loans as a wave of debt financing tied to the OpenAI commitment, carried out "despite concerns about rising credit risk in the AI sector." The picture that emerges is of a company repaying one large credit line while arranging new bank debt, has leveraged the OpenAI stake itself, and is preparing a possible large-scale bond sale — with a planned total investment of close to $65 billion by October as the framework.

The sources do not, however, describe why the company is replacing the repaid loan with new debt financing, or what the bond loan will be used for. It is therefore unclear whether this reflects a genuine financing need, a refinancing choice, or a combination. Some form of connection between the various settlements is suggested by the chronology, but none of the sources explain the sequencing.

What remains unclear

The key figures in the story rest on anonymous sources, not on documents from the company or the banks, and SoftBank has declined to comment. That applies to the loan amount, the number of banks, and the assessment of a possible bond sale. The amount is also stated with slightly varying precision in the coverage: $11.87 billion in the story itself, and $11.9 billion in the headline.

The connection between the various loan settlements, the margin loan, and the possible bond loan is likewise not fully documented, and the same applies to the causal relationship between the safety warnings, OpenAI's delayed listing, and the share prices. For the reader, this means that both the scale of SoftBank's AI exposure and the risk profile of its financing remain somewhat uncertain — but the direction is clear: the company is financing one of the largest single bets on AI to an increasing degree with loans, in the middle of a week when the market began pricing in both credit and safety risk in the sector.

The coming weeks offer two concrete markers: the conclusion of the New York investor meetings, which will show whether the $10–20 billion bond loan materializes, and September 15, when the stated repayment of $25.9 billion was scheduled to be carried out, according to SoftBank's own statement.