SoftBank Posts Record ¥5 Trillion Profit, But Cerebras Rejection and OpenAI’s $64.6 Billion Appetite Expose Cracks

SoftBank's $32B profit masks strategic pressures: Cerebras IPO rejection, OpenAI stake strain, and Arm's uphill battle against Nvidia in AI chips.

Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank Group has just delivered the largest annual net profit ever recorded by a Japanese company, yet the numbers alone cannot mask growing turbulence in its AI chip ambitions. The ¥5.002 trillion ($32 billion) windfall for the year ended March 2026 was overwhelmingly fuelled by a ¥6.73 trillion valuation gain on its OpenAI stake — a paper profit that masks a string of strategic and financial pressures.

The most immediate setback came from Silicon Valley. SoftBank and its majority-owned chip-design unit Arm Holdings made a direct approach to acquire Cerebras Systems, a developer of wafer-scale AI accelerators, just as the startup was finalising its initial public offering. Cerebras rebuffed the advance, choosing instead to press ahead with a float that now targets a valuation of roughly $48.8 billion. The company recently lifted its IPO price range to $150–$160 a share from an initial $115–$125, underscoring the white-hot demand for hardware capable of training large language models.

That rejection leaves SoftBank scrambling to build a credible rival to Nvidia without the quick fix of an acquisition. The group did complete the $6.5 billion takeover of server-processor specialist Ampere Computing late last year, and Arm itself is preparing to launch dedicated CPUs designed specifically for AI workloads — a significant departure from its traditional licensing model. Cerebras, with its distinctive wafer-scale engine that uses an entire silicon wafer as a single compute unit, would have given SoftBank an immediate challenger to Nvidia’s dominance. Now the burden falls on Arm to close that gap organically.

Yet the financial firepower required for such a push is already showing strain. SoftBank recently slashed plans for a margin loan secured against its OpenAI stake from $10 billion to as little as $6 billion, according to people familiar with the talks. That caution comes barely months after the group announced a $40 billion bridge financing facility in March to support investments in OpenAI and general corporate purposes. The group has already booked around $20 billion in valuation gains on its OpenAI holdings, which now total $34.6 billion. By the end of this calendar year it intends to increase that commitment to $64.6 billion — a bet that goes far beyond a passive investment and into core strategic territory.

The balance sheet, while stable, does not offer unlimited headroom. SoftBank’s net asset value stood at ¥40.1 trillion and its loan-to-value ratio improved to 17%, while the telecom arm — SoftBank Corp. — generated free cash flow of over ¥600 billion on revenue of ¥7.04 trillion, up 8% year-on-year. Those figures provide a buffer, but the sheer scale of the planned OpenAI escalation and the infrastructure build-out to support it raises questions about how much more debt the group can comfortably carry.

Son is charging ahead regardless. At a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron, he unveiled a $100 billion investment programme for AI data centres in France, with additional projects in the United States also on the drawing board. The telecom business is being repositioned as a vehicle for AI compute offerings and even large-scale battery-cell manufacturing, reflecting Son’s ambition to control every layer of the AI value chain from silicon to energy storage.

The stock market, meanwhile, took a dim view of the week’s developments. SoftBank shares closed at ¥5,735 on Thursday, down 4.61%, after opening at ¥6,100 and touching a low of ¥5,714. That pullback followed a 13.43% surge the previous week and a blistering 58.43% monthly gain — a rally that made profit-taking all but inevitable. The record annual results, boosted by the OpenAI revaluation, failed to attract new buyers amid rising uncertainty over the cost of Son’s AI offensive.

A successful Cerebras IPO would add a further twist: it would signal that coveted AI chip companies are not compelled to sell, putting SoftBank’s ability to snap up rivals in doubt. For now, Arm’s organic push and the Ampere acquisition must fill the void. With a $64.6 billion OpenAI commitment looming and infrastructure bills mounting, SoftBank’s ambition is not in question — but the funding arithmetic is tightening by the quarter.