TOKYO, Feb 12 (Reuters) – Japan’s SoftBank Group said on Thursday it logged a net profit of 248.6 billion yen ($1.62 billion) in the October-December quarter, boosted by the rising valuation of its investment in OpenAI.
The results, which mark SoftBank’s fourth consecutive quarter in the black, compare to a net loss of 369 billion yen over the same period the previous year.
SoftBank’s earnings have been flattered by the rising valuation of its investment in ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, which delivered a further – though smaller – valuation gain in the third quarter compared with three months earlier.
In the nine months to end-December, OpenAI has provided a 2.8 trillion yen investment gain.
SoftBank has now invested more than $30 billion in the firm, building a shareholding of around 11%, in an “all-in” wager it will emerge as a winner in the battle between competing developers of large language models.
To fund its bets, the technology investment group has turned to asset sales, bond issuance and loans backed by its other holdings, such as chip designer Arm.
These come on top of the sales of its $5.8 billion holding of Nvidia and part of its stake in T-Mobile for $12.73 billion between June and December last year, sparking investor concern over its ability to keep bankrolling OpenAI, which does not make a profit.
In December, SoftBank raised the amount it can borrow against its shares of telecoms unit SoftBank Corp to 1.2 trillion yen from 800 billion yen.
While OpenAI was once considered the dominant player among makers of large language models, it has recently been negotiating rising costs to train and run its AI models amid intensifying competition from the likes of Alphabet.
($1 = 153.2500 yen)
(Reporting by Anton Bridge and Sam Nussey; Editing by Jacqueline Wong)
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