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# Japan’s technology investor SoftBank Group sees profitability return on AI boom

February 16, 2026 | Staff Reporterd
A woman walks in front of SoftBank store in Ginza shopping district in Tokyo, Jan. 20, 2020.

TOKYO — SoftBank Group Corp., a Japanese company that makes technology and runs telecoms, stated on Thursday that it made money again in the final quarter of 2025. This was because its investments in OpenAI and other businesses paid off.

SoftBank Group made a profit of 248.6 billion yen ($1.62 billion) from October to December. This is a big change from the 369 billion yen in losses it made in the same quarter the year before.

Sales went up 8% to 1.98 trillion yen ($12.9 billion) per three months.

In October, Tokyo-based SoftBank Group sold its share in Nvidia for $5.8 billion. This was in line with the company's focus on AI.

The corporation added that it had made money from its investments in OpenAI, the company that made the AI chatbot ChatGPT, which it owns around 11% of.

Last year, SoftBank Group bought Ampere, a semiconductor design business based in the U.S., for $6.5 billion. After that, it became a wholly owned U.S. subsidiary.

Robotics is another thing I'm interested in. Last year, SoftBank Group and ABB agreed that SoftBank will buy ABB's robotics unit for $5.375 billion. The merger still needs to be approved by regulators in Europe, China, and the U.S. SoftBank Group had a profit of 3.17 trillion yen ($20.7 billion) in the nine months ending in December. This was roughly five times what it made the year before. Sales for the past nine months rose by about 8% to 5.7 trillion yen ($37 billion).

SoftBank usually doesn't give out yearly profit predictions.

Yoshimitsu Goto, the chief financial officer of SoftBank Group, told reporters, "Our investments are starting to pay off."

He said that the gains were coming from a number of investments, not just OpenAI. For example, he said that Arm, an AI semiconductor startup, was one of those investments.

SoftBank's financial success is typically unpredictable since it invests heavily in new, often unproven, technology.

Some observers say that relying too much on OpenAI could be dangerous, even though its investment in the company seems to have paid off thus far.

On Thursday, shares of SoftBank Group went up by 2.4%.

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