SoftBank Group’s talks to raise at least $6 billion through a margin loan backed by its OpenAI stake have stalled, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday. Prospective lenders balked at the core problem of valuing a private company as collateral, according to Eastern Herald, which cited concerns about missed internal sales and user acquisition milestones at OpenAI.
The deal had already been cut once. SoftBank originally sought $10 billion against the stake and reduced the target by 40 percent in May as lender caution surfaced, according to Bloomberg. Even at the lower figure, SoftBank secured roughly $5 billion in commitments before discussions stopped, Bloomberg and The Japan Times reported. The loan was structured as a two-year term with a one-year extension option, per Eastern Herald.
SoftBank’s Tokyo-listed shares fell as much as 9.7% on the news, according to The Japan Times via Let’s Data Science.
The Collateral Problem
Margin loans against private startup stakes are uncommon at any size because the lender needs to estimate what the collateral is worth under stress and requires liquid markets to exit positions. OpenAI’s paper valuation has been quoted as high as $1.4 trillion in secondary markets, but there is no public exchange where a lender could sell the position if SoftBank defaulted. As Eastern Herald noted, credit committees face both valuation and liquidity risk when underwriting large facilities against private AI equity.
The timing adds pressure. OpenAI filed a confidential S-1 registration with the SEC on Monday, according to Bloomberg, the step that would eventually produce audited financials and a public market price. Until that prospectus becomes public, every counterparty is underwriting a company whose disclosures remain private. OpenAI is reportedly working with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley on the potential listing.
Capital Still Flows, but on Different Terms
The stall does not mean the AI buildout has lost access to capital. It shows where the limits are. As Eastern Herald reported, Anthropic took $35 billion in private chip debt from Apollo and Blackstone secured against contracts and hardware. OpenAI is negotiating a 10-gigawatt data center campus on federal land with Nvidia’s backing. The pattern: lenders will finance things (chips, land, purchase orders) but not beliefs (unpriced private equity).
SoftBank has committed tens of billions to OpenAI and the Stargate infrastructure buildout, per Eastern Herald. The margin loan was the cheapest mechanism to fund those commitments without selling assets. The alternatives, selling Arm shares, drawing on other credit lines, or waiting for an OpenAI IPO to make the stake bankable, all carry costs that SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son has historically avoided.
The IPO Clock
Whether the loan revives depends partly on OpenAI’s IPO timeline. A public listing would replace the valuation ambiguity that stalled the loan with a daily market price, making the stake conventional collateral. Until then, SoftBank’s stalled deal is a real-time stress test of how the credit market prices private AI companies, and the current answer is: cautiously.