SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son Seeks Up to $100 Billion From Gulf Investors for New AI Buyout Fund, FT Reports

Masayoshi Son is going back to the well that made him the most talked-about technology investor of the past decade — and he is asking for more than he has ever raised before.

The SoftBank Group founder has held discussions in recent weeks with senior figures in the Gulf, including in the United Arab Emirates, about raising up to $100 billion for a new fund that would acquire companies outright and rebuild their operations around artificial intelligence, according to a report by the Financial Times published on Friday. The people familiar with the matter who spoke to the paper cautioned that there is no guarantee the discussions will produce a deal, and a SoftBank representative declined to comment on the report.

Reuters also reported the Financial Times account on Friday, adding that it could not independently verify the details and that SoftBank did not respond to its request for comment.

The proposed vehicle would sit apart from anything SoftBank has attempted before. Rather than taking minority stakes in technology startups — the classic Vision Fund playbook — the money would be used to buy whole companies and then improve them with AI and other advanced technologies, according to the Financial Times reporting. SoftBank's robotics and physical-AI business, Roze, is expected to play a central role in the effort, the report said.

The scale of the ambition is deliberate. A $100 billion target would match the original Vision Fund of 2017, which remains the largest private capital raise in history and the moment that redefined what a single investor could deploy in technology markets. Nine years later, Son is effectively proposing a sequel — this time with artificial intelligence as both the acquisition strategy and the value-creation engine.

Why now: a balance sheet under strain

The fundraising push arrives at a moment when SoftBank's finances are being tested on several fronts at once, and the timing is part of the story.

The company announced last week that it had completed a $30 billion investment in OpenAI as part of the ChatGPT maker's most recent fundraising round. According to reporting by the Financial Times and other outlets, SoftBank has now committed nearly $65 billion to OpenAI in total, making the Japanese conglomerate one of the single largest financial backers of the artificial-intelligence boom.

That concentration has consequences. When the Financial Times reported on Thursday that OpenAI's annualised revenue was roughly $50 billion at the end of September — about $20 billion lower than figures that had previously circulated among investors — SoftBank's shares fell as much as 7.3 per cent in Tokyo trading on Friday, according to the Japan Times and other outlets reporting on the story. The stock closed the week more than 30 per cent below its June peak, when SoftBank had briefly become Japan's most valuable company. The shares are still up about 25 per cent this year, but the week's slide illustrated how tightly SoftBank's market valuation is now tethered to investors' assessments of OpenAI's commercial progress.

The debt picture adds to the pressure. SoftBank raised $11.1 billion last month in what Reuters described as the largest high-yield corporate bond sale globally, earmarked for its OpenAI bet. According to reporting summarised by the Dealroom news service, the company has also upsized a margin loan backed by its Arm shares three times in 2026, most recently by $5 billion in September, taking it to $25 billion outstanding. It carries a $40 billion bridging loan that runs until March 2027, and an effort to borrow against its OpenAI stake stalled because lenders were wary of a private company that does not disclose financials the way a listed one does. S&P Global put the company's loan-to-value ratio at 33 per cent in March 2026; SoftBank prefers to cite a figure of 17 per cent.

Against that backdrop, a new vehicle funded substantially by outside money looks less like pure ambition and more like financial engineering. A separately financed acquisition fund would bring outside capital into SoftBank's investment programme without adding further leverage to the parent company's own balance sheet — although the proposed structure and SoftBank's own contribution to the new fund have not been disclosed.

The Gulf connection

The geography of the pitch is as significant as its size. The Gulf states have become the largest single pool of discretionary capital in the artificial-intelligence economy, and Son has courted them before with spectacular results.

Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund committed $45 billion to the first Vision Fund in 2017, while Abu Dhabi's Mubadala committed $15 billion, according to the Arabian Post — the two anchors that helped the vehicle reach nearly $100 billion at launch. The first Vision Fund went on to produce sharply contrasting outcomes, including exposure to successful technology businesses and losses associated with troubled investments such as the office-sharing company WeWork, which filed for bankruptcy in late 2023. Cumulative gains stood at about $29 billion at the end of June, according to figures cited by Dealroom.

This time, the cast of potential Gulf partners is both richer and more complicated. Abu Dhabi's MGX and G42 have emerged as major artificial-intelligence spenders in their own right, and neither responded to requests for comment on the report, according to the Financial Times coverage. The Japan Times noted that the Gulf itself is facing economic pressure from the ongoing Iran war, which has driven oil prices above $100 a barrel but also injected volatility into the region's fiscal planning — a reminder that sovereign investors, however wealthy, are not immune to the macroeconomic environment.

What remains unknown

For all the detail in the reporting, the most important elements of the plan remain undisclosed. Nothing has been said about how the fund would be structured, what SoftBank itself would contribute, how management fees and carry would work, or how the vehicle would fit alongside SoftBank's existing Vision Funds and its Stargate infrastructure commitments.

The role of Roze is another open question. The robotics and physical-AI unit is reportedly expected to play a key part in the acquisition strategy — the idea being that companies bought by the fund would be "improved" in part through robotics and automation supplied by SoftBank's own businesses. That would make the fund not just a buyer of companies but a customer pipeline for SoftBank's technology, a structure that raises questions about how conflicts of interest would be managed. SoftBank is also reportedly planning to list Roze in the United States, while its SB Energy unit, which is building an 8.8-gigawatt data centre in Ohio, is preparing a Nasdaq listing, according to the Japan Times.

Perhaps the deepest uncertainty concerns the underlying asset. OpenAI, the company in which SoftBank has invested nearly $65 billion, remains a private company that does not disclose financials in the way a listed one does — the very reason, according to reporting, that lenders balked at letting SoftBank borrow against the stake. The company's initial public offering timetable remains uncertain, complicating expectations about when major shareholders could realise part of their investments. An Asia-based analyst quoted by Dealroom warned that a "contagion effect" on SoftBank could "get quite bad, quite quickly" if sentiment turns against the AI trade.

Analysis: Why It Matters

Masayoshi Son has built his career on a single insight: that being early and being enormous can be the same strategy. The original Vision Fund worked — when it worked — because $100 billion deployed fast enough could set the terms of entire markets rather than merely participate in them. The proposed Gulf fund is the same insight applied to a different moment: artificial intelligence is no longer a sector to invest in, it is, in Son's telling, an industrial revolution to be imposed on every other sector.

That explains the buyout structure. Venture capital bets on startups; buyouts take over going concerns. A fund that acquires mature companies and retrofits them with AI and robotics is essentially a private-equity firm with a single, totalising thesis — that the application of artificial intelligence to ordinary businesses will generate returns large enough to justify a $100 billion fund. It is private equity's oldest trick (buy, improve, sell) crossed with the technology industry's newest religion. Whether Roze's robotics can actually deliver the operational improvements the pitch promises is the empirical question on which the entire structure rests.

The second thing that matters is the source of the money. In 2017, the Gulf's sovereign wealth funds were making their first giant bets on technology. In 2026, they are no longer passive sources of capital — they are competitors. MGX and G42 are building AI infrastructure of their own; the Saudi and Emirati funds have their own direct AI investment programmes. Son is asking these institutions to fund a vehicle he would control, in a domain where they now have their own ambitions. The leverage has shifted since 2017, and the negotiations, if they proceed, will reflect that.

The third is what the timing reveals. The pitch is being made at the exact moment SoftBank's balance sheet is most stretched: a record junk-bond sale, a tripled margin loan, a $40 billion bridge loan due in March 2027, and a share price that has lost nearly a third of its value since June because investors are questioning the commercial foundations of the OpenAI bet. There are two ways to read that. One is that Son is acting from strength, confident that AI's long-term value justifies more leverage. The other is that he is acting from necessity — that the existing financing channels (junk bonds, margin loans, bridge loans, Japanese retail savers) are tapped out, and the sovereign wealth funds are the only deep pockets left. A commentator writing in the alternative press put it bluntly: after maxing out junk bonds, margin loans and Japanese retail, it was time to "call the sovereigns."

The fourth is the OpenAI hinge. Almost everything in SoftBank's recent history now runs through its $65 billion OpenAI exposure: the share price, the borrowing capacity, the loan-to-value ratio, the justification for the entire AI strategy. The FT's revenue report this week — $50 billion annualised versus $70 billion previously suggested — moved SoftBank's stock 7 per cent in a single day. That is an extraordinary sensitivity for a $65 billion commitment, and it means the proposed $100 billion fund would be raised on a balance sheet whose value is itself heavily marked to a single private company's narrative. Until OpenAI either lists or produces the kind of cash flow that silences the sceptics, every SoftBank financing move will be read as a bet on a bet.

Finally, the WeWork shadow. The first Vision Fund's two poles — Alibaba's compounding success on one side, WeWork's 2023 bankruptcy on the other — remain the frame through which every Gulf sovereign will evaluate Son's pitch. Vision Fund 1 did produce cumulative gains, but the WeWork episode taught limited partners that scale amplifies judgment errors as efficiently as it amplifies insight. A $100 billion AI buyout fund is an invitation to relive that lesson at an even grander scale.

What to watch next: whether any Gulf institution actually commits money, and on what terms; the March 2027 maturity of the $40 billion bridge loan, which now functions as a deadline for the entire strategy; the planned US listings of Roze and SB Energy, which would test investor appetite for SoftBank's AI-adjacent assets in public markets; and OpenAI's own trajectory — its revenue reporting, its delayed IPO, and its separate fundraising at a reported $1.4 trillion valuation, in which MGX is reportedly in talks to anchor the round. The Gulf is being asked to be both the financier and, in the case of MGX, potentially a participant in the OpenAI round itself. That circularity — the same capital being courted for multiple overlapping AI vehicles — may be the most important dynamic of all.

Sources

• Reuters — “SoftBank seeks up to $100 billion from Gulf investors for AI push, FT reports” (October 9, 2026)
• The Financial Times — “SoftBank Seeks Up to $100B From Gulf Investors for New AI-Driven Buyout Fund” (October 9, 2026, reported via secondary coverage)
• The Japan Times (via The Outpost) — “SoftBank seeks $100bn from Gulf investors for AI expansion” (October 9, 2026)
• Dealroom News — “SoftBank seeks $100bn from Gulf investors to expand AI bet” (October 9, 2026)
• The Arabian Post — “SoftBank chief pursues $100 billion Gulf AI fund” (October 10, 2026)