Table of Contents
SoftBank Group, the Japanese conglomerate controlled by billionaire founder Masayoshi Son, has added $450 million to an existing credit facility to take it to $6.5 billion, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg, as the group's borrowing to fund artificial intelligence investments continues to mount.
The previous $6.05 billion facility was due to expire this month. SoftBank now has another year to draw on the larger amount. It is not known whether the company has used it or intends to.
Separately, Apollo Global Management is in talks to increase a loan to SoftBank to $9 billion from $5.4 billion, according to reporting on 17 September.
Son's financing was structured around an assumption: that OpenAI would eventually list, giving SoftBank a market price for its stake and a clean route to raising cash against it. On 12 September, Sam Altman said OpenAI will not go public this year.
That leaves SoftBank borrowing against an asset with no traded price, at a moment when it is racing to deliver a near-term tranche of roughly $22.5 billion to OpenAI before year-end, against total commitments to OpenAI and related AI infrastructure reported at more than $60 billion.
SoftBank has raised roughly $37 billion this year through bonds and loans. Last week it closed an $11.87 billion two-year facility with about 20 institutions, beating a $10 billion target. It said it would repay the outstanding $25.9 billion on a $40 billion bridge loan taken in March.
Among the borrowings is a $10 billion margin loan secured against its OpenAI shares, meaning a fall in the company's valuation would hit the balance sheet directly, not merely paper returns.
SoftBank carries a BB+ rating, one notch below investment grade. The cost of insuring its debt has reached a three-year high. Executives have been sounding out investors in New York on a dollar high-yield bond of between $10 billion and $20 billion.
The intelligence satisfies curiosity. The paid briefings satisfy strategy.
Every Monday, Elite subscribers receive an Investor Memo breaking down the deal, the structure and the positioning behind the week's most consequential African wealth story - the kind of analysis that doesn't appear anywhere else.
Twice a month, a Wealth Intelligence brief profiles a single billionaire's holdings, cash flows and expansion pipeline in detail no public source matches.
→ Executive ($25/mo): Daily newsletter + Deep-Dive Reports
→ Elite ($75/mo): Everything above + Investor Memos + Wealth Intelligence + Quarterly Analyst Briefings
Subscribe now
