Japanese technology giant SoftBank announced on Tuesday that it had sold its stake in NVIDIA, raising $5.8 billion to pour into other investments. It also announced that its profits nearly tripled in the first half of this financial year compared to the previous year.
Tokyo-based SoftBank Group Corp. said it sold its stake in Silicon Valley-based Nvidia in October, a move that reflects its shift in focus to OpenAI, owner of artificial intelligence chatbot software ChatGPT.
SoftBank announced that its April-September profits rose to about 2.5 trillion yen (about $13 billion). It added that its sales during the six-month period rose by 7.7% year-on-year to 3.7 trillion yen ($24 billion). The company’s fortunes tend to fluctuate as it invests in a range of projects, including through technology-focused Vision Funds.
These have recently paid off. In February, SoftBank Chairman Masayoshi Son joined Trump, Sam Altman of OpenAI, and Larry Ellison of Oracle in announcing a major investment of up to $500 billion in an artificial intelligence project called Stargate.
SoftBank has invested tens of billions of dollars in OpenAI. The two companies also plan to offer artificial intelligence services in Japan. The sale of SoftBank’s stake in Nvidia reflects Son’s shift in strategy and also nets his company a nice profit thanks to the recent rise in Nvidia’s market value.
Nvidia recently became the first $5 trillion company, just three months after breaking the $4 trillion mark. It plans to invest $100 billion in OpenAI as part of a partnership that will add at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia AI data centers to increase OpenAI’s computing power. It was the chip maker and other winners in the mania around artificial intelligence technology that drove much of this year’s rise in stock prices.
Critics say the tech giants’ stock prices rose too high, too quickly in the mania around artificial intelligence, drawing comparisons to the dot-com bubble of 2000 that eventually burst. SoftBank and Nvidia still have strong relationships as many of the projects SoftBank invests in use Nvidia technology. SoftBank also has investments in Arm Holdings and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., where computer chip makers like Nvidia benefit greatly from the growth of artificial intelligence.
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SoftBank shares have nearly doubled in value in the past year. They gained nearly 2% on Tuesday. Nvidia shares fell 1.3% in premarket trading early Tuesday. They jumped 5.8% on Monday.
(tags for translation) SoftBank Nvidia stake sale
