DigitalBridge shares surge 45% on report of SoftBank acquisition talks

DigitalBridge’s stock went wild early Monday, momentarily surging by 50% before US stock markets even opened.

The madness started after Bloomberg reported that SoftBank is in serious talks to buy the New York-listed data center company. Barely two hours later, the stock was still sitting 40.5% higher, while its total year-to-date gain hit 23%, according to data from Google Finance.

SoftBank allegedly wants DigitalBridge locked in as part of a bigger plan to grab more AI-related infrastructure, and it’s moving fast. Bloomberg’s unnamed sources (yep, the usual crew with “knowledge of the situation”) say the talks are advanced, and a deal could be announced literally today before the bell.

SoftBank’s AI strategy pushes it toward alleged DigitalBridge buyout

As Cryptopolitan has been reporting all year, SoftBank’s billionaire founder, Masayoshi Son, has been laser-focused on one thing: AI. And AI needs serious computing power, which means serious infrastructure, a.k.a exactly what DigitalBridge brings to the table.

The company is run by Marc Ganzi, and it had about $108 billion in assets under management as of late September, with a portfolio stuffed with operators like AIMS, AtlasEdge, DataBank, Switch, Vantage Data Centers, and Yondr Group, among others.

If this deal goes through, it’ll be another notch on SoftBank’s M&A belt. Back in 2017, it dropped more than $3 billion to acquire Fortress Investment Group. But that didn’t last forever, as SoftBank later sold its Fortress stake to a group that included Mubadala Investment Co., a sovereign fund from Abu Dhabi, and Fortress’s own management. That exit was wrapped up in 2024.

Slow Stargate rollout drives Son to reshuffle AI investments

In January, SoftBank teamed up with OpenAI, Oracle, and Abu Dhabi’s MGX to launch a massive $500 billion project called Stargate. The goal is to build a network of AI data centers across the U.S.

Masa even promised to throw in $100 billion right away. But like everything involving that much cash, things didn’t go exactly as planned.

Bloomberg said in May that SoftBank tried to raise outside financing from insurance firms, pension funds, and investment houses. But investor appetite dropped thanks to market volatility, trade policy uncertainty, and shaky confidence in AI hardware valuations. Those hiccups caused some of the Stargate planning to slow down, especially around where to actually build the centers.

By September, the group had finally named five sites (in Texas, New Mexico, and Ohio) that would eventually host about 7 gigawatts of computing power, which is about as much electricity as a small city uses.

To fund all this AI obsession, Masa had to sell off other holdings. Earlier this month, he admitted he “was crying” over having to dump his $5.8 billion Nvidia stake just to free up the money. That sell-off was part of his bigger push to go all-in on AI infrastructure.

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