ByRashi Shrivastava,
Forbes Staff.
Welcome back to The Prompt,
Softbank has sold its entire stake in Nvidia—worth some $5.8 billion—to support its $30 billion investment in OpenAI, the Japanese tech conglomerate disclosed in its earnings report today. The news, which caused the chipmaker’s stock to dip 2%, highlights just how deeply tech companies’ fortunes are woven together. (Though Nvidia wasn’t its only sell-off to fund its OpenAI investment: Softbank also dumped 40 million T-Mobile shares, worth $9.17 billion.)
Surprisingly, this isn’t the first time Softbank has cashed out of the chipmaker. The company had accumulated a $4 billion stake in Nvidia before deciding to sell it in 2019. SoftBank founder and CEO Masayoshi Son said last year he regretted exiting that investment, which would have earned SoftBank more than $150 billion, noting, “The fish that got away was big.” Time will tell if this second big sale will pay off.
