SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attend an event to pitch AI for businesses in Tokyo, Japan Feb. 3, 2025.
SoftBank posted a $2.4 billion gain at its Vision Fund in the December quarter as a jump in the value of its OpenAI investment helped offset losses in some of its other bets.
The Japanese giant said it made a $4.2 billion gain on the value of its OpenAI investment in its fiscal third quarter, which runs to the end of December, offsetting losses stemming from the share price declines of Coupang and Chinese ride-hailing app Didi.
The company also said investment losses were impacted by a markdown in its stake in TikTok creator ByteDance.
This helped SoftBank Group book fiscal third-quarter net profit of 248.6 billion yen ($1.6 billion), which missed analyst estimates, but was a reversal of the loss seen in the same period last year.
With the Vision Fund, SoftBank has invested in AI companies it believes will be category winners, seeking to position itself at the center of the technology's development.
In 2024, SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son said the world was a decade away from artificial superintelligence — or ASI — which he described as technology 10,000 times more intelligent than humans.
During a presentation on Thursday, Yoshimitsu Goto, chief finanical officer at SoftBank Group, said 60% of the company's assets are now "ASI-oriented investments."