SoftBank Group reported a roughly $46 billion Vision Fund gain for the fiscal year ended March 2026, with nearly all of it tied to OpenAI, as a single AI position transformed Masayoshi Son's conglomerate from a sprawling tech investor into something closer to an AI infrastructure pure-play.
Quarterly net income hit ¥1.83 trillion — about $11.6 billion — compared with ¥517 billion a year earlier and an analyst consensus near ¥295 billion. Full-year net income reached roughly ¥5 trillion. The Vision Fund alone booked about $20 billion of gains in the quarter, with OpenAI driving the overwhelming majority of the move. Cumulative OpenAI-related gains for fiscal 2026 came in at roughly $45 billion.
The OpenAI position
SoftBank has deployed approximately $34.6 billion into OpenAI to date and now carries the stake at $79.6 billion as of March 31. The mark reflects OpenAI's $852 billion valuation from the March funding round that SoftBank co-led. Once existing pledges are fully drawn, total committed capital is expected to approach $64 billion for an ownership position of about 13%.
Not everything in the portfolio performed. Bloomberg Intelligence reported that the quarter's profit was effectively all OpenAI: holdings including Coupang, DiDi Global, and Klarna posted offsetting losses. The concentration is what makes the result both remarkable and contentious.
A rebuild around AI infrastructure
The earnings cap a year in which SoftBank has been openly restructuring around AI compute. The group established a dedicated AI Computing segment that pairs the OpenAI exposure with its roughly 87% stake in Arm Holdings, and in late April the board approved charter changes adding data center development, construction, and operation — along with robotics manufacturing and leasing — as core business purposes.
The pipeline of commitments is large by any measure. SoftBank is part of the Stargate Project, the cooperative venture with Oracle, MGX, and OpenAI targeting roughly $500 billion of US AI infrastructure investment. It is leading a separate consortium on a US natural-gas power project pegged at about $33 billion, and is preparing Roze AI, a new robotics and data-center venture that reports have targeted for an IPO at up to a $100 billion valuation.
Debt is the other story
The paper gains arrive against a balance sheet that has clearly stretched. S&P Global revised SoftBank's outlook to 'negative' in March, citing concentration and liquidity risk. SoftBank has drawn $17.5 billion of a $40 billion bridge facility tied to its OpenAI commitments, and one Bloomberg Intelligence summary characterized the situation bluntly: the company is marking up OpenAI while borrowing more to buy more of it.
For the AI industry, the headline is the same one investors have been quietly underwriting all year: OpenAI's private valuation, more than any single product launch, is now setting the financial weather for some of the largest balance sheets in technology.
