SoftBank has cut the target for a margin loan backed by its OpenAI stake by 40%, lowering the goal to $6 billion from a prior figure understood to be around $10 billion. The reduction, reported by Bloomberg News and picked up by Reuters, marks a visible pullback in one of the year's most closely watched AI-collateralized financings.
Margin loans of this kind let a holder borrow against the market value of an equity position without selling the underlying shares. For SoftBank, the structure was meant to extract liquidity from its OpenAI position while leaving the upside intact. A 40% haircut on the target suggests the firm could not place the full $10 billion at terms it found acceptable.
The cut lands at an awkward moment for SoftBank, which has been recycling capital aggressively to fund AI bets across its portfolio. Masayoshi Son's firm is among OpenAI's largest outside backers and has anchored several of the company's recent funding rounds, making the OpenAI stake one of the most valuable single positions on its books.
Key facts
- 01SoftBank cut its target for an OpenAI-backed margin loan by 40%, down to $6 billion.
- 02The reduction implies the original loan target was around $10 billion before the haircut.
- 03The loan is collateralized against SoftBank's equity stake in OpenAI.
Margin loans against private company shares are inherently harder to syndicate than those backed by listed equities. Lenders have to model a haircut, a default scenario, and an exit — all without a daily share price. When the underlying asset is a private AI company whose valuation has moved by tens of billions of dollars in a single year, those models get conservative quickly.
“SoftBank's $6 billion target represents a 40% haircut from the original plan, a sharp retreat for a deal meant to convert the firm's OpenAI stake into spendable cash.”— Jaeden Schafer
OpenAI's most recent secondary tender valued the company at roughly $500 billion, a level that on paper makes SoftBank's stake worth far more than the loan target. The fact that lenders still pushed back on size suggests the issue is not the headline valuation but the volatility, governance complexity, and lock-up terms attached to private OpenAI shares.
The reduction also signals that the easy phase of AI-backed leverage may be ending. Banks and private credit funds have spent the past 18 months happily lending against AI infrastructure, AI revenue, and AI equity. A visibly trimmed deal at SoftBank — the most experienced AI investor on earth — is the kind of data point credit committees notice.
For OpenAI, the news is more reputational than operational. The company itself does not raise or repay the loan; it sits inside SoftBank's capital structure. But OpenAI has been threading a careful line on secondary liquidity for its shareholders and employees, and any sign that the market for OpenAI-backed paper is thinner than assumed feeds into those conversations.
SoftBank has not publicly addressed the $6 billion figure, and the firm has historically restructured financings mid-flight without flagging the changes. Bloomberg's reporting frames the move as a target cut rather than a deal collapse, meaning the loan is still expected to close — just smaller.
The skeptical read is that SoftBank simply could not get $10 billion done at a price it was willing to pay, and the firm chose a smaller, cleaner deal over a drawn-out negotiation. The more generous read is that SoftBank scaled the loan to its actual near-term cash needs, which have shifted as other parts of its AI strategy — including its commitments to OpenAI's compute buildout — have come into sharper focus.
Either way, a 40% haircut is the kind of number that gets cited the next time someone tries to borrow against a private AI position. SoftBank's willingness to lever its OpenAI stake set a template for the rest of the market, and the revised template now reads $6 billion, not $10 billion. That recalibration matters more than the single deal.
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