SoftBank Is Trying to Raise Up to $100 Billion From Gulf Investors to Buy and AI-Upgrade Companies

SoftBank is asking Gulf investors, including in the United Arab Emirates, for up to $100 billion to seed a fund that buys companies outright and retrofits them with AI, the *Financial Times* reported Friday, citing people familiar with the talks. The discussions are early and preliminary, no investor has committed, and SoftBank has not confirmed the plan publicly.

The fund's strategy would reportedly lean on Roze, SoftBank's robotics and physical-AI business, to apply automation inside the companies it buys rather than simply fund AI startups from the outside -- a different model from SoftBank's existing AI bets, which run mostly through minority stakes and compute commitments.

The timing is pointed. SoftBank shares fell as much as 7.3% in Tokyo the day of the report, which coverage tied to investor concern over the pace of OpenAI's revenue growth rather than to the Gulf talks themselves. SoftBank has already committed roughly $65 billion to OpenAI and raised $11.1 billion last month in the largest high-yield corporate bond sale in the world to help fund that bet. A fresh $100 billion ask, on top of that exposure, is the kind of number that invites its own skepticism -- Elon Musk responded to the report by saying "only a fool would give them money."

Gulf sovereign wealth has backed SoftBank before -- Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and Abu Dhabi's Mubadala were anchor investors in the original Vision Fund, which closed with nearly $100 billion in 2017. Whether the same backers return at the same scale, while the region's economies are also absorbing the fallout of the prolonged Iran war, is the open question the *Financial Times*' sourcing doesn't yet answer.