Masayoshi Son Double Down: SoftBank Completes $10 Billion Additional Investment in OpenAI, Japan's First Round of 387.3 Billion Yen AI Subsidy Implemented. Noetra

TradingKey - During the Asian session on July 1, SoftBank announced that it has completed an additional $10 billion investment in OpenAI through its Vision Fund II. This marks the second installment of its previously announced $30 billion follow-on investment plan. Under the plan, the final $10 billion investment is scheduled to be completed on October 1.

Including the first installment that closed in February, SoftBank's cumulative investment in OpenAI has now crossed the $60 billion threshold. Based on OpenAI's current valuation of $730 billion, SoftBank's ownership stake is expected to rise to approximately 13% once all three investments are completed.

Just on June 30, according to Japanese media reports, Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) announced that it will allocate 387.3 billion yen in development consignment fees to Noetra, a new company led by SoftBank. This represents the first installment for fiscal year 2026. Noetra boasts a heavyweight lineup of shareholders: SoftBank, NEC, Honda, and Sony Group have joined forces with the goal of building Japan's own proprietary AI foundational model from scratch.

The company does not intend to compete head-on with OpenAI in the general-purpose track, but is instead targeting specific weak points, namely Japanese language comprehension and multimodal recognition. Images, video, audio, and even physical space perception and modeling are all included in the training objectives. The project has already qualified for support from the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) with a planned five-year cycle, and METI's total budget expectation is approximately 1 trillion yen. Noetra plans to officially kick off R&D this month and deliver Japan's largest self-developed AI model by 2027.

SoftBank Share Price Performance

The capital markets did not respond positively to these two pieces of news. On July 1, the Nikkei 225 Index rose 0.59% to close at 70,474.96 points. Although SoftBank's stock price jumped over 4% in early trading , it quickly pared those gains , closing up only 0.62%.

[Source: TradingView]

Just days earlier on June 26, affected by market rumors that OpenAI might delay its IPO, SoftBank's stock price plummeted over 12% that day. The market's sensitivity to OpenAI's listing timeline reflects investors' anxiety over the monetization cycle of SoftBank's massive bets.

Even the slightest rumor regarding the IPO timeline is enough to cause violent fluctuations in SoftBank's stock price. This indicates that the market's pricing logic for this investment has always been predicated on the assumption that "OpenAI will eventually go public." Once this premise is shaken, investors' patience quickly wears thin.

The pressure does not come solely from the stock price. SoftBank had previously planned to use its OpenAI shares as collateral to apply for a $10 billion margin loan from banks, but some financial institutions adopted a conservative stance, forcing the final financing size to be scaled back to $6 billion. According to media reports in June, SoftBank's negotiations with potential lenders for the $6 billion loan had stalled. Under the dual pressures of the interest rate environment and high debt leverage, how SoftBank balances the tension between large-scale AI investments and its financial health is becoming a focus of ongoing market attention.

Delays in OpenAI's Monetization and Netra's Commercialization Challenges

The monetization path for the OpenAI line of investment is relatively clear: once the IPO is completed, shares can be liquidated, and the scale of returns can be directly measured. The real variable lies in the time window, as the timing of the listing remains unclear, leaving the market without a reliable benchmark for judgment. June 26 already caused SoftBank's single-day decline to exceed 12%, providing a clear reference for the price the capital market pays for waiting.

The situation for Noetra is far more complex. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) has classified the project's intellectual property under the framework of public infrastructure management; while SoftBank participates in the R&D, it does not possess exclusive rights to the results. The profit distribution logic of state-commissioned projects differs fundamentally from private enterprise investments, making it currently impossible to provide even a rough estimate of how much commercial profit SoftBank can ultimately derive from this line of business.

SoftBank is currently betting on two directions simultaneously: the leading global artificial general intelligence (AGI) player, and the local execution of Japan's national AI strategy. The two fronts are independent of each other, neither hedging risks nor guaranteeing one another. A continued delay in OpenAI's listing, or a lack of progress in Noetra's commercialization, would exert pressure on SoftBank's valuation framework in either scenario.

The direction of the situation depends on which of the two milestones is reached first: OpenAI filing its prospectus and establishing market pricing, or Noetra's model moving out of the lab to verify its viability in commercial scenarios. Until then, the gains or losses of any single trading day are merely reflections of the same bet across different temporal cross-sections.