SoftBank raises $11B in debt for OpenAI investment
A $10 billion dollar and €1 billion euro issuance funds the third installment for OpenAI, closing on October 1, while canceling a $10 billion bridge line.
SoftBank on Monday issued $10 billion in unsecured senior notes in dollars and an additional €1 billion in euros, totaling just over $11 billion to pay for the third installment of its investment in OpenAI. According to the term sheet distributed to investors, pricing is set for September 24 and settlement for September 29.
The structure consists of five tranches: dollar-denominated papers maturing in 3.5, 5.5, and 7.5 years, and euro papers maturing in 4 and 6 years. Citigroup and JPMorgan are leading the placement. Of the total raised, $10 billion will go towards the third tranche of the follow-on investment in OpenAI, with the operation expected to close on October 1, and the remainder for general corporate purposes. The issuance also cancels a previously arranged $10 billion bridge line that SoftBank had established with banks for the same payment.
The Rating Tells the Story that Size Hides
Fitch assigned a BB+ rating to the proposed notes, the highest tier of speculative grade. S&P maintains a BB+ rating on SoftBank itself. For comparison, Alphabet and Amazon, the two largest corporate issuers in 2026, hold ratings of AA+ and AA. The difference is not cosmetic: there are five tiers between those financing AI capex with operational cash and those financing with high-yield debt.
If the offering is completed as intended, it will mark the largest non-financial corporate bond issuance ever made in the Asia-Pacific region and Japan, surpassing the $10.93 billion raised by 7-Eleven in January 2021. SoftBank has already sold approximately $15 billion in bonds across various currencies throughout 2026, making it the largest speculative-rated corporate issuer in the bond market this year.
The change in instrument matters more than the volume. A $10 billion bridge line is short-term bank risk, renegotiable, and concentrated among a few counterparties. Replacing it with bonds maturing in up to 7.5 years shifts that risk to the market and pushes the maturity beyond the horizon in which the bet on OpenAI needs to show returns.
The Circular Financing Chain
The money does not stop flowing at OpenAI. Part of it reappears in compute commitments: Nscale, a UK data center company that filed for an IPO in New York last week, reported $103 billion in total contract value, of which 85% comes from Microsoft and Anthropic, according to its listing document. The same filing shows that only $2.6 billion of that value was active at the end of August, and that the company had a net loss of $1.02 billion on revenue of $140.6 million in the first half of 2026.
The contrast between contracted backlog and realized revenue is the data that a CFO should bring to the budget meeting. Long-term commitments for AI infrastructure are being signed at magnitudes well above current supporting revenues, partly financed by issuers with speculative ratings.
Where Risk Lands
In Japan, SoftBank is one of the most closely followed issuers by domestic investors, and a record issuance in dollars and euros shifts some of this risk outside the local base that has historically absorbed its bonds. The euro tranche broadens the buyer base to European credit managers, who will now have indirect exposure to an unlisted American asset.
In the United States, the effect is one of pricing. Citigroup and JPMorgan are effectively establishing the cost benchmark for speculative-grade debt tied to AI, which becomes a floor for smaller issuers seeking to finance a data center or GPU with debt instruments.
For financial executives outside of these two markets, including in Brazil and India, the impact comes through another channel. Pension funds and managers with a global credit mandate absorb this paper via high-yield indices, often without treating the exposure as a technology risk. When the cost of capital curve for AI moves, it moves across all portfolios replicating those indices.
It is worth noting what undermines the pessimistic reading: SoftBank continues to obtain financing through well-received papers, and its shares hit an all-time high this year amid optimism surrounding OpenAI. A BB+ rated issuer with a listed asset and liquidity is not a startup burning venture cash. The open question is not whether SoftBank can place the paper, but how many times it can repeat the operation before the market demands a higher premium on each subsequent tranche.