SoftBank Group Reports Profit Beat, Boosted by Intel, ByteDance Stakes — 2nd Update

By Kosaku Narioka

SoftBank Group reported a drop in first-quarter profit due partly to lower gains from its technology funds business, though its bottom line still beat expectations, helped by a surge in the value of its stakes in Intel and TikTok parent ByteDance.

The Japanese technology investment company said Thursday that it booked an investment gain of 1.333 trillion yen, equivalent to $8.45 billion, on Intel shares, as well as a $2.2 billion gain in its ByteDance stake.

In August 2025, SoftBank agreed to invest $2 billion in Intel at $23 a share. Intel shares recently traded at around $101, helping boost the value of SoftBank's stake in the U.S. chip maker.

SoftBank's stake in Intel is held separately from its Vision Funds, which own stakes in OpenAI and other various technology companies.

The Vision Funds business posted sharply lower profit from a year earlier, weighed by valuation losses in artificial intelligence-powered robotic warehouse automation company Symbotic and others. The business reported profit of Y5.43 billion, down from the Y451.39 billion profit in the same period a year earlier, which had been boosted by gains in e-commerce company Coupang and others.

SoftBank said the value of its stake in OpenAI, the maker of the widely used AI chatbot ChatGPT, hadn't changed since the end of March. The Tokyo-based company recorded a gain of $25 billion on its stake in the ChatGPT maker in the January-March quarter.

It added that its Vision Fund 2 plans to borrow $10.0 billion against its OpenAI shares this month.

Investors are keenly watching Softbank given concerns about intense fundraising by companies for capital expenditure on AI as well as worries over whether these efforts will create a blockbuster engine for profits in the future.

SoftBank Chief Financial Officer Yoshimitsu Goto said Thursday at a briefing that there is an overwhelming supply shortage in data centers and that many projects taking place one after another is a good thing. "If we can't secure this compute, the growth pace of the AI technology industry will slow down," he said.

The Japanese company has made several large investments in OpenAI and plans to make another $10 billion investment in October. That would bring SoftBank's total investment in OpenAI to $64.6 billion, representing a stake of about 13%.

In May, SoftBank Group unveiled a $52 billion data-center plan in France to tap the country's nuclear-driven power surplus and diversify its data-center footprint outside the U.S. and Japan.

Last week, Softbank unit Arm Holdings posted higher fiscal first-quarter net profit as demand for its chip designs continued to grow across AI infrastructure and data centers.

SoftBank's net profit fell 18% from a year earlier to Y347.33 billion for the three months ended June. That still beat the estimate of Y125.9 billion in a poll of analysts by data provider Visible Alpha.

Write to Kosaku Narioka at kosaku.narioka@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

August 06, 2026 07:21 ET (11:21 GMT)