SoftBank is in negotiations to invest up to $ 25 billion in Openni as part of a wider partnership that could see the Japanese conglomerate spend more than $ 40 billion in artificial intelligence initiatives with the startup supported by Microsoft, according to the Financial Times.
The potential investment would make the largest SoftBank Openi single backer, says the report, overcoming Microsoft, which for the first time invested in the maker chatgpt in 2019. The agreement comes after both companies announced last week that they would hit Conjunctually $ 100 billion in Stargate, a US project for Openii which could expand to $ 500 billion in four years.
SoftBank plans to invest $ 15 billion in $ 25 billion directly in Openai in addition to his commitment as Stargate of $ 15 billion, says the report. Openai will invest about $ 15 billion in Stargate, with the equally potentially softbank investment that covers the infrastructure commitment of Openi.
The interviews arrive at a time when the release of the Chinese Deepseek company of its “reasoning” model of R1, which was built on a relatively modest budget, has unleashed public markets this week.
The giant of Nvidia chip lost up to $ 589 billion in a day before making a slight recovery, since investors worried that large investments in expensive artificial intelligence hardware may not be necessary if companies could obtain similar results with less resources.
Openai said at the beginning of this week that he had found evidence that Deepseek used the owner models of Opeeni to train R1 and other models through a technique called “distillation”, which allows developers to obtain similar performance with smaller models to a much lower cost. The company states that this would violate its terms of service, which prohibit the use of outputs to develop competing models.
Openi’s agreement with Softbank, which according to Financial Times has not aimed, represents the largest bet of the Fon of the son of Softbank Masayoshi since he injected $ 16 billion in Wework. It would also reduce Openai’s dependence on Microsoft for calculation resources, with Microsoft who recently agreed to give up its position as an exclusive cloud provider of Openi.
About 20% of Stargate’s funding should be equity, with the rest financed through the debt guaranteed by activities and cash flow, says the report. Openi, who has achieved an evaluation of $ 157 billion last year, is also negotiating to become a profit for profit to facilitate additional fund collections.
