SoftBank scrambling to come up with $22.5B in OpenAI funding before New Year

Japanese tech investment giant SoftBank needs to secure $22.5 billion before the end of the year to make good on its commitments to AI partner OpenAI.

According to Reuters, there are several levers SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son could pull in order to put the funding package together, including calling on untapped margin loans tied to its stake in British chip design firm Arm Holdings.

SoftBank is one of OpenAI's principal financiers in its $500 billion Stargate datacenter initiative announced during a White House appearance nearly a year ago alongside Oracle and Abu Dhabi-based investment firm MGX.

The ambitious infrastructure development aims to dot the US and other nations with enough GPU bit barns to fuel the development of OpenAI's next-gen models and further the advancement of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), AI superintelligence, or whatever Altman is calling it these days.

Whether OpenAI and its partners could actually ...