SoftBank revives $10bn OpenAI-backed loan with a new sweetener for lenders

SoftBank has gone back to lenders with a $10bn loan proposal secured against its OpenAI stake, and this time it is offering to personally guarantee the debt, according to Reuters, which cited people familiar with the discussions.

The concession gives banks recourse to SoftBank itself if the pledged OpenAI shares fall short of covering the loan, addressing the core objection that sank an earlier version of the deal.

The renewed talks mark the third iteration of a facility that has shrunk, stalled, and now grown teeth. SoftBank originally floated the $10bn margin loan in the spring, then cut the target to as little as $6bn in May after several creditors balked at pricing debt against an unlisted, difficult-to-value asset.

Even that smaller version reportedly hit a snag before talks paused altogether. The lending group under discussion is expected to include Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Mizuho Financial Group, the same names that have anchored SoftBank’s broader OpenAI financing stack.

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Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp and MUFG Bank were also involved in earlier rounds of the talks, according to prior reporting. None of the banks has commented publicly on the renewed negotiations.

What appears to have shifted the calculus is timing rather than valuation. OpenAI confidentially filed a draft S-1 with the SEC on June 8, opening a path toward a public listing that would, eventually, give lenders an actual market price to lend against instead of a private mark struck in March.

That filing does not resolve the immediate problem, since OpenAI has said publicly that going public “may be a while,” but it changes the shape of the bet creditors are being asked to make.

SoftBank’s exposure to OpenAI is now large enough that the loan matters beyond its own balance sheet.

The group has committed more than $60bn to OpenAI and adjacent AI infrastructure, including its share of the Stargate data centre venture with OpenAI and Oracle, at a post-money valuation of $852bn struck in OpenAI’s record March funding round.

Layered on top is a separate, harder deadline. SoftBank must repay or refinance a $40bn unsecured bridge facility, signed in March to fund its OpenAI follow-on, by late March 2027.

That facility was underwritten by the same core group of banks and has since drawn eight sub-underwriters, including HSBC, BNP Paribas and Intesa Sanpaolo.

A margin loan against the OpenAI stake would give SoftBank another lever to manage that repayment without having to sell down the position outright.

The stakes rose further last week. Reports that OpenAI was leaning toward pushing its IPO into 2027, rather than debuting this year, wiped roughly $38bn off SoftBank’s market value in a single session, since a delayed listing means a delayed liquidity event for the asset underpinning both the bridge loan and the proposed margin facility.

None of this changes what the loan is actually for. SoftBank wants to borrow against paper wealth without crystallising it, a strategy that works cleanly when the underlying asset is liquid and gets considerably more complicated when it is a single private company’s shares, however large that company.

The corporate guarantee shifts some of that complication back onto SoftBank’s own credit rather than leaving it entirely with the collateral, which is presumably the point.

Whether $10bn actually closes this time, or shrinks again the way the $6bn version did, will depend on how the banks read two moving pieces at once: the eventual outcome of OpenAI’s IPO timeline, and how much comfort a parent guarantee actually buys when the guarantor’s own share price is this exposed to the same underlying bet.