SoftBank Group x OpenAI investment

OpenAI is a San Francisco based AI research and product company that has become one of the largest committed buyers and co-developers of datacenter capacity in the world. Founded in December 2015 by Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever and others, it operates as OpenAI Group PBC (a public benefit corporation) after a 2025 restructuring, with Microsoft holding roughly a 27 percent stake and continuing as its principal cloud partner. In June 2026 the company filed for an IPO with the SEC. On the infrastructure side, OpenAI is a 40 percent co-owner of Stargate LLC, the joint venture announced with SoftBank, Oracle and Abu Dhabi's MGX in January 2025 to build AI training and inference campuses. Stargate targets 10 GW of capacity, with initial site build-out concentrated in Abilene, Texas and five additional US sites announced in September 2025 (Shackelford County TX, Milam County TX, Doña Ana County NM, Lordstown OH, plus one undisclosed Midwest site). International Stargate sites are under exploration in the UK, Norway, Japan, the UAE and Argentina (up to 500 MW in Patagonia). The Stargate arrangement is unusual in that the capacity is contracted exclusively to OpenAI as tenant: OpenAI is simultaneously a co-owner of the operating vehicle and its sole workload. Silicon commitments span Nvidia (initial partner), AMD (up to 6 GW of Instinct GPUs) and Broadcom (10 GW of custom accelerators). This makes OpenAI, alongside Microsoft, one of the two anchor demand-side counterparties reshaping US grid siting decisions in 2025 and 2026.

SoftBank Group Corp. (TSE: 9984) is a Japanese investment holding conglomerate founded in 1981 by Masayoshi Son. Headquartered in Tokyo, it manages the SoftBank Vision Fund, ARM Holdings, and a global portfolio of technology investments. SoftBank owned [Boston Dynamics](/companies/boston-dynamics) from 2017 to 2022 before selling it to Hyundai Motor Group, and has invested in numerous robotics and AI companies through its Vision Funds.