SoftBank Liquidates Assets to Meet $22.5B OpenAI Payment Deadline

Facing a December 31 deadline, SoftBank Group is reportedly liquidating assets and leveraging its stake in Arm Holdings, the British chip designer, to fund a $22.5 billion commitment to OpenAI. Executives are securing liquidity via margin loans rather than depleting cash reserves.

Driven by OpenAI’s valuation surging to nearly $900 billion in recent talks, the payment secures an equity position for CEO Masayoshi Son. Financial engineering comes as the AI lab faces a projected $207 billion funding gap by 2030.

Separately, Alphabet has agreed to acquire Intersect Power for $4.75 billion. By purchasing the renewable energy developer directly, Google aims to bypass grid interconnection queues that threaten to stall its own AI data center expansion.

Liquidity Crunch

SoftBank faces a hard deadline of December 31, 2025, to transfer the committed capital to OpenAI. Despite holding approximately $27 billion in parent-level cash as of September 30, CEO Masayoshi Son has reportedly opted not to deplete the corporate war chest for a single transaction.

Instead, the conglomerate is executing an asset liquidation strategy to raise the funds without touching its primary reserves. A key component involves leveraging its stake in Arm Holdings to secure up to $11.5 billion in margin loans.

According to Reuters detailing the available liquidity options:

“SoftBank has a couple of avenues by which to raise the funds. SoftBank could borrow about $11.5 billion in capital against its stake in Arm Holdings. The company also holds a four percent stake in T-Mobile worth about $11 billion, as well as about $27 billion in cash it could call upon to settle the agreement as of the end of September.”

Debt financing follows the total liquidation of SoftBank’s Nvidia stake in November. That sale generated $5.8 billion in proceeds, a sum that proved insufficient to cover the full OpenAI commitment.

Commenting on the sale, Masayoshi Son admitted that he “was crying to sell Nvidia shares. I don’t want to sell a single share. I just had more need for money to invest in OpenAI and other projects.”

Selling T-Mobile US shares contributed another ~$4.8 billion to the liquidity pool. Market analysts view this activity as an indicator of the capital intensity required to maintain equity positions in the current market.

Burning Cash to Buy Paper Gains

Driving this urgency is OpenAI’s valuation, which has surged from $300 billion in April to nearly $900 billion in recent valuation estimates. Securing the equity stake before the year-end allows SoftBank to book a “paper gain” on its balance sheet for the fourth quarter.

However, the underlying asset is consuming capital rapidly. OpenAI projects an operating loss of $14 billion in 2026.

HSBC Global Investment Research has quantified the long-term risk, forecasting a funding gap of $207 billion for OpenAI that widens by the end of the decade.

Such a disparity between OpenAI’s scaling costs and its revenue generation creates a solvency deficit that requires constant capital injection. SoftBank is effectively trading liquid assets like the Nvidia stake sale for illiquid equity in a private company with high capital requirements.

Physical Toll: How OpenAI Cornered the Memory Market

Capital inflows into OpenAI are also causing downstream disruptions in the global hardware supply chain. OpenAI has secured a deal for 900,000 DRAM wafers per month from Samsung and SK Hynix.

Representing approximately 40% of the global DRAM production capacity, the volume effectively corners the market.

Consumer consequences appeared quickly. DDR5 memory prices rose from ~$200 to ~$750 between September and November 2025.

Amid these drastic developments, Micron Technology has exited the consumer market entirely, shutting down its “Crucial” brand to refocus on enterprise supply.