SoftBank is seeking to raise as much as $100 billion from investors in the Gulf states for a new AI-focused fund, according to a report in the Financial Times — the Japanese group's biggest fundraising attempt yet as Masayoshi Son works to keep his conglomerate at the center of the global AI buildout.
The FT's report, published Friday, was quickly picked up by Reuters, Bloomberg and The Information, all citing the same core ask: SoftBank wants up to $100 billion from Gulf investors to bankroll its next phase of AI investing. As our AI business coverage has documented, the company's financing machinery has been running at full tilt for months — this would dwarf all of it.
A Fund Built to Acquire and Convert
What makes the reported vehicle different from SoftBank's earlier mega-funds is its stated operating model. Rather than writing passive checks into startups, the fund would be used to acquire companies and improve their operations using artificial intelligence and robotics, as Tom's Hardware summarized the FT's reporting.
That is an acquisition-and-transformation thesis: buy established businesses, inject AI systems and automation, and capture the resulting gains in productivity and value. It is also a thesis that requires enormous patient capital — hence the courtship of Gulf sovereign investors, whose state-backed funds have become among the most important sources of financing for the AI industry's expansion.
Neither SoftBank nor the prospective Gulf investors have publicly confirmed the talks or the amount, and the FT's sources were described as people familiar with the matter. Details like the fund's structure, management fees and timeline were not disclosed in the initial reports.
The Financing Machinery Behind the Ask
The reported $100 billion push arrives just over a week after SoftBank completed one of the largest single commitments in private-market history. As Reuters first reported and SoftBank confirmed on October 1, the company executed the third and final $10 billion tranche of its $30 billion follow-on investment in OpenAI, taking its cumulative investment in the ChatGPT developer to roughly $64.6 billion for a stake of about 13 percent.
That completion was financed in part by one of the most aggressive corporate debt offerings on record. In September, SoftBank sold $11.1 billion of dollar- and euro-denominated bonds — the largest high-yield corporate bond sale ever, surpassing the previous record set by France's Numericable in 2014, according to Reuters, citing LSEG data — with coupons reaching 9.75 percent. The offering followed a separate 1 trillion yen (about $6.3 billion) retail-oriented bond sale in Japan earlier in the month.
Put simply: SoftBank is asking investors in the Gulf to fund its next $100 billion bet at the same time it is asking bond investors to finance the current one, and analysts are increasingly vocal about the risks of stacking that much leverage on a single technological thesis. Benzinga's coverage of the FT report noted that the company's roughly $65 billion OpenAI commitment is already raising eyebrows — and a new $100 billion vehicle would multiply the stakes.
Why the Gulf Keeps Bankrolling AI
Gulf sovereign wealth funds have spent the past two years positioning themselves as indispensable financiers of the AI economy, trading access to their capital for data centers, chip capacity and strategic partnerships with US and Chinese AI firms. For fund managers in Abu Dhabi, Riyadh and Doha, SoftBank's pitch has an obvious appeal: exposure to AI returns across entire acquired portfolios rather than through single company bets.
For Son, the appeal is equally clear. The SoftBank founder has spent four decades making enormous, concentrated bets on technological transformations — and losing big on some, winning bigger on others. The reported fund would give him a fresh $100 billion of runway to apply that playbook to what he has described as the biggest transformation of all, without putting SoftBank's already-stretched balance sheet on the hook for all of it.
What to Watch
Three questions will determine whether the FT's report becomes a deal. First, how much of the $100 billion is actually committed by Gulf institutions, whose earlier AI pledges to other managers have sometimes materialized more slowly than announced. Second, what the fund's governance looks like — and whether SoftBank's own capital sits alongside the Gulf money or the vehicle is designed to keep the conglomerate's leverage in check. Third, how debt markets react: SoftBank's bond investors are effectively underwriting the company's AI thesis at high-yield rates, and each new mega-fund announcement tests their appetite.
SoftBank did not respond to the FT's report publicly at the time of writing. If the fundraising comes together at anywhere near the reported scale, it would rank among the largest investment vehicles ever assembled — and further concentrate the world's AI ambitions in the hands of a small circle of sovereign capital and one of its boldest stewards.
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