Japan's technology investor SoftBank Group sees profitability return on AI boom

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TOKYO (AP) — Japanese technology and telecoms giant SoftBank Group Corp. swung back into profitability in the last quarter of 2025 as its investments in OpenAI and other ventures paid off, the company said Thursday.

SoftBank Group reported a 248.6 billion yen ($1.62 billion) profit for the October-December period, a reversal from 369 billion yen in losses racked up in the same quarter a year earlier.

Quarterly sales rose 8% to 1.98 trillion yen ($12.9 billion).

Tokyo-based SoftBank Group sold its stake in Nvidia for $5.8 billion in October, in line with its focus on artificial intelligence.

It has invested nearly $35 billion in OpenAI, the developer of the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, for an ownership interest of about 11%, which has brought investments gains, the company said.

Among other investments, last year SoftBank Group acquired Ampere, a U.S.-based semiconductor design company, for $6.5 billion, after which it became a wholly owned U.S. subsidiary.

Another interest is robotics. SoftBank Group reached an agreement with ABB last year to acquire its robotics business for $5.375 billion. The deal still needs regulatory approval, including in Europe, China and the U.S.

For the nine months through December, SoftBank Group posted a 3.17 trillion yen ($20.7 billion) profit, about five times what it recorded in the previous year. Nine-month sales edged up nearly 8% to 5.7 trillion yen ($37 billion).

SoftBank generally does not release annual profit forecasts.

“Our investments are beginning to pay off,” SoftBank Group's chief financial officer, Yoshimitsu Goto, told reporters.

He stressed the gains were coming not just from OpenAI but from a variety of investments, including in Arm, an AI semiconductor company.

SoftBank’s financial performance tends to be erratic because it is an aggressive investor in innovative, often fledgling, technology.

Although its banking on OpenAI appears to have paid off so far, some analysts caution that counting too much on OpenAI could be risky.

SoftBank Group shares rose 2.4% on Thursday.

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Yuri Kageyama is on Threads: https://www.threads.com/@yurikageyama