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SoftBank seeks $11bn bond sale to partly fund OpenAI investment
The $10bn SoftBank owes OpenAI on 1 October is the exact size of the dollar leg of the bond it prices on 24 September. Yields on its 2031 paper have moved from 6.7% in January to about 8.2% in September.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- SoftBank has launched a bond sale of roughly $11bn, made up of $10bn in senior unsecured dollar notes and 1bn euros of euro notes, across five tranches running from three and a half to seven and a half years.
- Pricing is set for 24 September and settlement for 29 September, with Citigroup and JPMorgan leading the sale.
- On 27 February SoftBank committed $30bn to OpenAI through Vision Fund 2 at a $730bn pre-money valuation, payable in three equal installments on 1 April, 1 July and 1 October.
- SoftBank said on 9 September that it had prepaid $25.9bn of the $30bn drawn against a $40bn facility arranged in March, leaving around $4.1bn outstanding.
- S&P and Fitch both rate the group BB+, the top rung of speculative grade, and its 2031 dollar bond was yielding about 8.2% in September against 6.7% in January.
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Why it matters
- cost SoftBank has sold its entire $5.8bn Nvidia stake and about $9.2bn of T-Mobile shares, $15bn together, so part of what the OpenAI schedule costs is paid in positions the group no longer holds.
- constraint The installment dates were fixed in February, so SoftBank pays on 1 October at whatever offshore investors are charging in the week the deal prices.
- contradiction SoftBank's own method put loan-to-value at 13% on 30 June while S&P assessed 33%, so anyone sizing the group's leverage before signing a dependency has to choose whose figure to use.
- decision Teams modelling frontier-model costs into 2027 now have to decide whether to treat OpenAI's backing as venture appetite or as a high-yield credit whose price is set by bond buyers.
Most vendor-risk templates have a row for financial stability, and for teams building on OpenAI it gets filled in with a sentence about who is behind it. This week there is a number for that sentence. Three equal installments out of a $30bn commitment puts $10bn due on 1 October [5][1], and the dollar leg of the bond is $10bn [1]. The whole raise is about $11bn, roughly a billion more than the payment [1][5].
What the money costs is on the record. SoftBank paid 7.625% on three-and-a-half-year notes in April and 8.250% on five-and-a-halfs [8]. Carrying $10bn at that 8.250% runs about $825m a year in interest. The same $10bn at 4.75%, the coupon on the record retail bond SoftBank priced in Japan on 4 September, costs $475m [11][2]. For the same borrower, the two are $350m a year apart.
In February SoftBank said the OpenAI commitment would be financed first with bridge loans and later replaced by existing assets and other financing measures [6]. This bond is that replacement in the company's own terms, and most of the bridge it replaces has already been repaid [7]. Bloomberg, cited by Business Today, reported something narrower: the proceeds will partially fund a follow-on investment in OpenAI closing next month [19]. Arm is pledged against a $25bn margin loan and has not been sold [14]. Cumulative investment in OpenAI now reaches $64.6bn for a stake of about 13% [16].
Neither report addresses what OpenAI charges for its models, so nothing here is a forecast of token prices. What the deal prices is the capital behind the commitment, in an offering Bloomberg called one of the largest high-yield sales on record [18]. OpenAI is discussing a private round at a considerably higher valuation than the $730bn pre-money SoftBank paid, with final terms due on 24 September, the day the bond prices [17][3].
The test I would run on any vendor dependency has two columns. Is the spending committed or discretionary, and is it funded from cash and asset sales or from debt that gets repriced at every visit to the market. A vendor in the committed-and-repriced column keeps paying on schedule because the contract says so, and the cost of paying shows up later in pricing or in what gets built. SoftBank's 1 October payment sits in that column, and coupons and final guidance on the bond have not been reported [3].
What to watch
- Coupons and final guidance when the deal prices on 24 September, and whether the gap to the 4.75% Japanese retail bond holds.
- OpenAI's private round terms, due the same day, and the valuation it settles at above the $730bn pre-money SoftBank paid.
- Whether the remaining $4.1bn of the March bridge facility is cleared from this raise or from another asset sale.