Masayoshi Son, Chairman and CEO of SoftBank Group Corp., speaks at the event “SoftBank World” held in Tokyo on Wednesday, July 16, 2025. Son and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman argued via conference call that advances in artificial intelligence will lead to new jobs not yet imagined and that advances in robotics will help start a loop of “self-improvement.” Photographer: Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg via Getty Images
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SoftBank Group shares fell as much as 10% on Wednesday after the Japanese giant announced it had sold its entire stake in U.S. semiconductor giant Nvidia for $5.83 billion. The capital will be used to support SoftBank's $22.5 billion investment in ChatGPT's parent company, OpenAI, people familiar with the matter told CNBC.
SoftBank Group's stock price has recently fallen more than 6%.
SoftBank announced in its financial results report that it sold 32.1 million shares of Nvidia stock in October. It also cut its T-Mobile position and raised $9.17 billion.
SoftBank Chief Financial Officer Yoshimitsu Goto said in a presentation to investors, “While we can maintain our financial strength, we want to provide investors with many investment opportunities.''
While the decision to sell its Nvidia stake may have caught some investors off guard, it is not the first time SoftBank has exited a large U.S. semiconductor company.
The company's Vision Fund was an early supporter of NVIDIA, reportedly building up a $4 billion stake in 2017 before selling it outright in January 2019. Despite the sale, SoftBank maintains close ties to NVIDIA through its extensive business interests.
“This is a bullish signal on the SoftBank doubling theme, not a bearish signal in our view,” said Dan Ives, global head of technology research at Wedbush Securities.
While OpenAI is the centerpiece of SoftBank's GenAI portfolio, hardware also remains a priority, primarily through its stake in British chip designer Arm, with which SoftBank is co-developing products, said Rolf Balck, equity research analyst at New Street Research. SoftBank has a controlling stake in UK-based Arm Holdings, whose chip designs power mobile and AI processors.
Several other tech stocks in the region also fell. Advantest, a semiconductor testing equipment manufacturer, and Tokyo ElectronThe chip-making equipment maker fell more than 2%.
Taiwan's TSMC, the world's largest contract semiconductor maker, fell 0.34%. South Korean memory chip maker SK Hynix fell 1.62%.
—CNBC’s Dylan Butts and April Roach contributed to this report.