SoftBank offloads entire $5.83 billion stake in Nvidia — firm sells off stock, cash will fund major investment in OpenAI, also in talks over Stargate

SoftBank has confirmed it sold its entire stake in Nvidia in October, offloading 32.1 million shares for $5.83 billion. The disclosure came Tuesday alongside the Japanese conglomerate’s latest earnings report, which also revealed a $9.17 billion sale of T-Mobile US shares. Both moves form part of a broader strategy to reallocate capital into artificial intelligence ventures, among which is most notably a deepening alignment with OpenAI.

The stake sale severs a direct investment link between SoftBank and the world’s most valuable chipmaker at a time when Nvidia’s position in the AI boom is virtually unchallenged. Nvidia’s data center GPU business is currently driving quarterly revenues in the tens of billions, with hyperscale buyers like Microsoft and Meta securing multi-quarter supply commitments. Even so, SoftBank is shifting focus from component suppliers to the companies consuming that compute and the infrastructure required to deliver it at scale.

According to reporting by Reuters, proceeds from the Nvidia divestment will support SoftBank’s expanding AI portfolio, including a major investment in OpenAI and its ecosystem. The company is also in talks to fund Stargate, a next-generation AI data center initiative co-developed by OpenAI and Oracle that could cost tens of billions of dollars and require thousands of Nvidia accelerators.

SoftBank reported a net profit of approximately $16.6 billion for the quarter. While its Vision Fund segment remains volatile, the firm has increasingly positioned itself as a key capital allocator in AI, betting on end-to-end dominance from model development to deployment infrastructure.

Despite the Nvidia sale, SoftBank retains a strategic foothold in the silicon stack. It continues to own approximately 90 percent of Arm, whose CPU cores power everything from smartphones to Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell CPU and future AI-focused Windows laptops. That keeps SoftBank embedded in AI hardware even as it steps away from Nvidia’s equity entirely.

The sale has had no visible impact on trading so far in terms of Nvidia’s stock value. The company’s shares remain near all-time highs, supported by record earnings and strong forward guidance, and in spite of a high-profile bet against the firm by Michael Burry, famed for predicting the 2008 global financial crisis. But SoftBank’s sale signals how large investors are beginning to re-evaluate where the next wave of AI value might accrue. Speaking to Reuters, SoftBank CFO Yoshimitsu Goto said that its investment in OpenAI was “very large” and the company had to use its “existing assets to finance new investments.”

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