> SoftBank said Tuesday it has sold its entire stake in U.S. chipmaker Nvidia for $5.83 billion as the Japanese giant looks to capitalize its “all in” bet on ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
I would have thought that the OpenAI bet is way more risky, because if someone comes along with a better model it could really hurt OpenAI. NVIDIA seems harder to dethrone imo.
In many ways OpenAI is transitioning towards an end-user facing product business. They have by far the strongest brand among consumers and are positioning themselves to take on Google/Meta in the ad business.
By proxy, having the strongest frontier model becomes less and less necessary for them and instead building a strong product by properly layering medium-strong models in a cost-efficient way is the priority.
This argument regarding brand loyalty gets repeated but it’s really weak to me. The immense majority of people don’t tie their identity to the software services they are using. Without network effects or an ecosystem locking customers will switch as soon as there is a less expensive and/or better alternative, as the history of software has shown countless of times.
I can see a world where if everything they do pans out, on average 1B "entities" end up paying 20$/mo to openAI, via the myriad of integrations they end up supporting. Where entity can be a user, and one human can have many entities (i.e. a work account where the company pays, a personal account, etc). That'd be a quarter of a T$ revenue / year. Dunno, while the number is so large it's hard to compute, it somewhat seems plausible.
Selling the _entire_ stake sounds really aggressive though? Is that normal?
Even if you're all-in on OpenAI, does it not make financial sense to have _some_ stake in Nvidia considering they are the only ones with an actual moat?
Unless there are CUDA alternative breakthroughs we will hear about in the next few days.
For researchers and academics, cuda is painful to avoid, but I'm not sure that it is for large companies, once the time comes to train and deploy large models.
They recognise that the larger bubble is in the datacenters.
Most of the hardware we are using was designed for computer graphics not AI. Now that China isn't buying Nvidia any longer and actively trying to get their own companies to produce hardware, what happens to all these datacenters when a company produces a device that has 80% of the performance of the current Nvidia hardware but 20% of its power consumption?
I personally wouldn’t put much value on this event. I’ve never been impressed by SoftBank’s investment decisions. Of course, it has a good amount of money. But its decisions on ARM, WeWork, etc., have made it seem like it’s just (uninformed/underinformed) gambling.
> SoftBank said Tuesday it has sold its entire stake in U.S. chipmaker Nvidia for $5.83 billion as the Japanese giant looks to capitalize its “all in” bet on ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
> SoftBank Vision Fund recorded a $3.3 billion return on its Nvidia investment. The fund's February 2019 closeout of its Nvidia position preceded the AI boom and Nvidia's rapid transformation into one of the world's most valuable companies.
Masayoshi Son has form when it comes to calling the top of the market with this particular company.
It looks more like a strategic reallocation than a panic exit. Nvidia has already delivered outsized returns, while OpenAI represents a leveraged bet on the next layer of the AI stack - software and services rather than hardware. SoftBank probably sees more upside (and influence) there, even if the risk is higher
In numbers, yes, a rounding error. In fact, SoftBank was one of Nvidia's backers, and whatever this sell means in the stock markets, this is a strong signal.
We will find out in next few months but I predict they had a great exit at the high. As the AI bubble seems to be deflating even if not popping with the largest economy in the world insulating itself from western tech and AI.
I'm on investing subreddits all the time, and I'd expect it there.
But I don't see how this is "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
If there wasn't an AI bubble narrative, then sure, this this would gratify my curiousity. But now I don't see it, not even in the most charitable way.
I'm curious what the line of thinking is on how this does, in some way, gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Edit: I figured that I'd get all the downvotes. I've been here long enough to understand the social dynamics of the site. Funnily enough, I was more in the "Hacker News" demographic between 2015 and 2023. Since then, it has shifted a little. Nowadays, I have to force myself a bit to sound more positive than I actually am in order for my comments to be appreciated (in terms of upvotes, as I do view that as a form of social feedback), and that is fine.
I understand that this post gives bad vibes or sounds perhaps a bit mean? I am not intending it that way. I really just don't get it. Look at my comment history, I sometimes ask questions like this, but not that often. I suspect I'm not the only one in this.
There is an AI bubble narrative, people are curious when it will burst. This is an indicator that people will want to analyse, discuss, and think about (intellectually).
I see. I guess I simply think that Softbank isn't a good indicator for that. To me, they don't seem better than any other investment company that puts their money into technology stocks with a growth narrative. For example, they invested in WeWork and FTX.
They don't know the future, just like the rest of us.
If we're talking indicators, if 5 Softbanks would do it in rapid succession one after another it just mentions to me that the "smart money" is showing signs of moving out.
In terms of whether AI will or will not fuel growth, I think it will fuel growth. Self-driving cars seems to be a solved problem for cities at least fairly soon (e.g. Waymo, anti-example: Tesla, camera's is not the way).
It's a question whether LLMs state of the art models will grow more, but what hasn't been done that well yet is integrating it into current software. I know, because in part, that's my job. There's still a huge productivity unlock there, also in ways that people can't fully imagine.
Right now, LLMs seem to be an enabler for software engineers, especially software engineers on smaller projects (I can't find the research at the moment, it was a while ago that I read it). It seems to be an enabler for many people, but they do need to put time into prompting it in a way that works for them.
Fixing the context window issues and others I think will be really hard tasks, because I suspect we then need to know what goes on inside the black box.
If an LLM could continuously learn, so somehow continuously keep updating its weights such that it learns better, that would be a breakthrough.
I agree to be fair. I see Softbanks move as just wise strategy. Nvidia's growth won't be uncapped.
I wouldn't be surprised if they reinvest some of that money into AMD or similar, as those companies play catch up. AMD is bringing ROCM up to speed with AI models, and their consumer hardware is having pretty good press despite some PR fumbles.
Selling Nvidia stock isn't a sign of lack of faith, it's just an exit after strong results. Softbank think this is a peak or near enough, good for them.
As you say, until there's some breakthrough, there's little point keeping money in the dominant company.
Also, Nvidia appear to have delayed their 60-series GPUs, and this will cascade to their entreprise models, due to the 3GB module memory shortage. The next gen will be VRAM heavy, but you can't do that during a shortage, you need the market to correct tor for supply to increase. So any 'breakthrough' powered by new hardware is now about a year away.
This won't stop people secondguessing on the bubble front though. Personally, I think bubble popping is going to come from a lack of faith from investors in the downstream companies like OpenAI who are struggling to make money from their resource intensive products. Nvidia are already profitable with the hardware, MS/Google/Amazon will always make money with the servers. And if AI bursts, other sectors can soften the blow for those companies. It's the massively inflated AI model makers that need to worry about who makes it out of this profitably.
I mean for me it is, but not in an intellectual sense. Don't get me wrong, there are some good articles on HN about HFT and the technicality of it, but this is just, I don't know. Why Softbank? Didn't other big investment banks/funds sold out of NVidia at some point? Cathy Wood maybe, at some point? Why wasn't that on HN?
Stock news is barely on HN.
Oh, wait, I guess I see it now. It is on HN way more frequently when it involves Big Tech. And NVidia is increasingly seen as part of that. It used to be FAANG but now it's the Magnificent 7. The bias shifted.
After reddit doing IPO and getting blasted by AI content, seems a lot of reddit-only people have come over to HN.
Quality of technical content and discussions has visibly gone down since. More emotional/low-value/political replies everywhere. Slowly turning into /r/programmerhumor...
Note the first line:
> SoftBank said Tuesday it has sold its entire stake in U.S. chipmaker Nvidia for $5.83 billion as the Japanese giant looks to capitalize its “all in” bet on ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
They are switching gears, not exiting, folks.
I would have thought that the OpenAI bet is way more risky, because if someone comes along with a better model it could really hurt OpenAI. NVIDIA seems harder to dethrone imo.
It's SoftBank though, weird risk taking investments seems to be their jam.
It's because they are playing with other (dumb) people's money.
That's how you get to have $6B to throw around on just one part of one your strategies though to be fair.
Yea, I was thinking the same thing.
In many ways OpenAI is transitioning towards an end-user facing product business. They have by far the strongest brand among consumers and are positioning themselves to take on Google/Meta in the ad business.
By proxy, having the strongest frontier model becomes less and less necessary for them and instead building a strong product by properly layering medium-strong models in a cost-efficient way is the priority.
This argument regarding brand loyalty gets repeated but it’s really weak to me. The immense majority of people don’t tie their identity to the software services they are using. Without network effects or an ecosystem locking customers will switch as soon as there is a less expensive and/or better alternative, as the history of software has shown countless of times.
It's hard to see how they become profitable enough to justify current valuations.
The numbers are just mind boggling even in the optimistic scenario.
I can see a world where if everything they do pans out, on average 1B "entities" end up paying 20$/mo to openAI, via the myriad of integrations they end up supporting. Where entity can be a user, and one human can have many entities (i.e. a work account where the company pays, a personal account, etc). That'd be a quarter of a T$ revenue / year. Dunno, while the number is so large it's hard to compute, it somewhat seems plausible.
Selling the _entire_ stake sounds really aggressive though? Is that normal?
Even if you're all-in on OpenAI, does it not make financial sense to have _some_ stake in Nvidia considering they are the only ones with an actual moat?
Unless there are CUDA alternative breakthroughs we will hear about in the next few days.
Amazon’s Idaho 2Gw data center it’s building for Anthropic has 0 Nvidia Cuda cores.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-says-anthropic-will-us...
> Anthropic is using 500,000 of Amazon’s Trainium2 chips for its Claude AI models as part of the tech giant's Project Rainier
For researchers and academics, cuda is painful to avoid, but I'm not sure that it is for large companies, once the time comes to train and deploy large models.
Isn't it merely a matter of time before China has an alternative?
They don't even need to invent anything. Just put in some work to polish what already exists: https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA
They recognise that the larger bubble is in the datacenters.
Most of the hardware we are using was designed for computer graphics not AI. Now that China isn't buying Nvidia any longer and actively trying to get their own companies to produce hardware, what happens to all these datacenters when a company produces a device that has 80% of the performance of the current Nvidia hardware but 20% of its power consumption?
the key is "looks to"
Softbank can also choose not to.
Maybe they're trying to bail out OpenAI, but that's still not close to the amount they would need to do that. OpenAI needs like 1.3 trillion dollars.
So averaging up then? That's even worse. More like degeneracy and gambling.
I personally wouldn’t put much value on this event. I’ve never been impressed by SoftBank’s investment decisions. Of course, it has a good amount of money. But its decisions on ARM, WeWork, etc., have made it seem like it’s just (uninformed/underinformed) gambling.
There is no craziness here. It's a "Value rotation". Sell high, buy low, repeat. Capture a higher rate of return.
OpenAI just completed separating it's non-profit and for-profit restructuring: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/28/open-ai-for-profit-microsoft...
This probably means the for-profit structure will be going public in 2026, and there is probably a last private round happening.
This should be the news of the day, or even should I say, the news of the last 3 years.
The bubble is starting to crack.
There's no sign of cracking here:
> SoftBank said Tuesday it has sold its entire stake in U.S. chipmaker Nvidia for $5.83 billion as the Japanese giant looks to capitalize its “all in” bet on ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
I think the gulf between what an entity does and what an entity says should at least form part of a measured response to that.
SoftBank selling their stake in the AI shovel company to put it all directly in the AI gold rush company is evidence of bubble starting to crack?
A highly-useful autocomplete with a tricky monetization.
> SoftBank Vision Fund recorded a $3.3 billion return on its Nvidia investment. The fund's February 2019 closeout of its Nvidia position preceded the AI boom and Nvidia's rapid transformation into one of the world's most valuable companies.
Masayoshi Son has form when it comes to calling the top of the market with this particular company.
Last top was 2022
It looks more like a strategic reallocation than a panic exit. Nvidia has already delivered outsized returns, while OpenAI represents a leveraged bet on the next layer of the AI stack - software and services rather than hardware. SoftBank probably sees more upside (and influence) there, even if the risk is higher
Related?
https://www.marketbeat.com/instant-alerts/filing-curbstone-f...
https://www.fool.com/investing/2025/11/11/billionaire-stanle...
Good point to cash out in my opinion. Extremely likely you can buy NVDA back cheaper in the future.
$5.83B is too large to be a round trip. This is clearly an exit.
Nvidia current market cap is 4.84 trillion dollars. Yes, that's roughly 5 trillions of dollars. 5.83B is a rounding error.
In numbers, yes, a rounding error. In fact, SoftBank was one of Nvidia's backers, and whatever this sell means in the stock markets, this is a strong signal.
Market capitalization is not equal to real money. Take a look at how Elon Musk bought Twitter.
Maybe. Could go up still, but a surprisingly conservative move for SoftBank.
But hey, maybe the market crashes tomorrow and this is seen as the best piece of timing ever seen, maybe it doubles in the next year.
In any case, you never lose by taking profit.
I’m not calling the top, but I think it’s incredibly likely we’ll see NVDA with a lower market cap than this in the next 3 years.
Softbank is likely in trouble and needs the cash or something.
SoftBank, according to its stock, is in the best shape ever.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SFTBY/
And per the stock prices Tesla is worth more than every other car manufacturer ever, as well.
Until it wasn’t. Then it was again.
Either way, cash flow != stock price, not that SoftBank is in a ‘business’ that likely needs a lot of cash.
Maybe they just needed a new yacht?
Or need to bail out one of their investments?
Interesting - is buying SoftBank a proxy for owning some OpenAI at this point ?
I thought Nvidia was the proxy!
It's proxies all the way down
... to reverse proxy
We will find out in next few months but I predict they had a great exit at the high. As the AI bubble seems to be deflating even if not popping with the largest economy in the world insulating itself from western tech and AI.
Totally not a bubble [0], Move along now, nothing to see here. /s
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45795158
Well the news should probably be "sold its entire stake", as in it's already over and done.
I was a skeptic in AI crapware, but if SoftBank is selling Nvidia to the moon is almost a guarantee
I'm sorry, why is this on Hacker News?
I'm on investing subreddits all the time, and I'd expect it there.
But I don't see how this is "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
If there wasn't an AI bubble narrative, then sure, this this would gratify my curiousity. But now I don't see it, not even in the most charitable way.
I'm curious what the line of thinking is on how this does, in some way, gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Edit: I figured that I'd get all the downvotes. I've been here long enough to understand the social dynamics of the site. Funnily enough, I was more in the "Hacker News" demographic between 2015 and 2023. Since then, it has shifted a little. Nowadays, I have to force myself a bit to sound more positive than I actually am in order for my comments to be appreciated (in terms of upvotes, as I do view that as a form of social feedback), and that is fine.
I understand that this post gives bad vibes or sounds perhaps a bit mean? I am not intending it that way. I really just don't get it. Look at my comment history, I sometimes ask questions like this, but not that often. I suspect I'm not the only one in this.
I'm curious if this is the beginning of the rumored "pop".
It is not.
There is an AI bubble narrative, people are curious when it will burst. This is an indicator that people will want to analyse, discuss, and think about (intellectually).
I see. I guess I simply think that Softbank isn't a good indicator for that. To me, they don't seem better than any other investment company that puts their money into technology stocks with a growth narrative. For example, they invested in WeWork and FTX.
They don't know the future, just like the rest of us.
If we're talking indicators, if 5 Softbanks would do it in rapid succession one after another it just mentions to me that the "smart money" is showing signs of moving out.
In terms of whether AI will or will not fuel growth, I think it will fuel growth. Self-driving cars seems to be a solved problem for cities at least fairly soon (e.g. Waymo, anti-example: Tesla, camera's is not the way).
It's a question whether LLMs state of the art models will grow more, but what hasn't been done that well yet is integrating it into current software. I know, because in part, that's my job. There's still a huge productivity unlock there, also in ways that people can't fully imagine.
Right now, LLMs seem to be an enabler for software engineers, especially software engineers on smaller projects (I can't find the research at the moment, it was a while ago that I read it). It seems to be an enabler for many people, but they do need to put time into prompting it in a way that works for them.
Fixing the context window issues and others I think will be really hard tasks, because I suspect we then need to know what goes on inside the black box.
If an LLM could continuously learn, so somehow continuously keep updating its weights such that it learns better, that would be a breakthrough.
I agree to be fair. I see Softbanks move as just wise strategy. Nvidia's growth won't be uncapped.
I wouldn't be surprised if they reinvest some of that money into AMD or similar, as those companies play catch up. AMD is bringing ROCM up to speed with AI models, and their consumer hardware is having pretty good press despite some PR fumbles.
Selling Nvidia stock isn't a sign of lack of faith, it's just an exit after strong results. Softbank think this is a peak or near enough, good for them.
As you say, until there's some breakthrough, there's little point keeping money in the dominant company.
Also, Nvidia appear to have delayed their 60-series GPUs, and this will cascade to their entreprise models, due to the 3GB module memory shortage. The next gen will be VRAM heavy, but you can't do that during a shortage, you need the market to correct tor for supply to increase. So any 'breakthrough' powered by new hardware is now about a year away.
This won't stop people secondguessing on the bubble front though. Personally, I think bubble popping is going to come from a lack of faith from investors in the downstream companies like OpenAI who are struggling to make money from their resource intensive products. Nvidia are already profitable with the hardware, MS/Google/Amazon will always make money with the servers. And if AI bursts, other sectors can soften the blow for those companies. It's the massively inflated AI model makers that need to worry about who makes it out of this profitably.
Stock market is really, really interesting
I mean for me it is, but not in an intellectual sense. Don't get me wrong, there are some good articles on HN about HFT and the technicality of it, but this is just, I don't know. Why Softbank? Didn't other big investment banks/funds sold out of NVidia at some point? Cathy Wood maybe, at some point? Why wasn't that on HN?
Stock news is barely on HN.
Oh, wait, I guess I see it now. It is on HN way more frequently when it involves Big Tech. And NVidia is increasingly seen as part of that. It used to be FAANG but now it's the Magnificent 7. The bias shifted.
That'd make sense.
After reddit doing IPO and getting blasted by AI content, seems a lot of reddit-only people have come over to HN.
Quality of technical content and discussions has visibly gone down since. More emotional/low-value/political replies everywhere. Slowly turning into /r/programmerhumor...
> Why Softbank?
most of HN bought their houses on the back of softbank throwing money at everything that moved