SoftBank Sells T-Mobile Stake for $4.8 Billion to Bet on AI

(Bloomberg) — SoftBank Group Corp. raised around $4.8 billion through a sale of T-Mobile US Inc. shares, a move that helps fund the Japanese company’s grandiose plans for artificial intelligence.

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The Tokyo-based technology group sold 21.5 million T-Mobile shares for $224 each — pricing at the bottom of the $224 to $228 range — in an unregistered overnight block sale, according to the final terms of the deal seen by Bloomberg News. The offering, which Bloomberg reported earlier, represents a discount of 3% to T-Mobile US’s Monday closing price of $230.99 per share.

SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son is ramping up investments aimed at making AI reasoning superior to humans’. He’s overseeing plans to put down as much as $30 billion in OpenAI and is also working with the ChatGPT creator to ferry hundreds of billions of dollars into data centers and related infrastructure around the world under the Stargate banner. SoftBank’s original plans for debt financing had snagged on uncertainties around US tariffs.

T-Mobile shares were down 3.8% mid-morning in New York, their steepest decline since April. SoftBank’s US-traded shares were up about 1%. Representatives for SoftBank and T-Mobile declined to comment.

The deal is the biggest US share sale since Toronto-Dominion Bank sold a $13.1 billion stake in brokerage firm Charles Schwab Corp. in February. Sales of new and existing shares in US-listed companies reached $91.4 billion in the year to date, up from $75.9 billion in the same period a year ago, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

The T-Mobile stake sale would be the latest example of Son tapping past investment successes — such as an early bet on Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. that’s yielded thousands-fold returns — to fund new ventures.

What Bloomberg Intelligence Says

This sale could lower adjusted loan-to-value by 1-2 percentage points, but it might need to monetize close to $10 billion more to keep adjusted LTV below a 30% downgrade trigger — assuming it invests about $40 billion in OpenAI, Stargate and the acquisition of Ampere Computing — based on March figures and the current share prices for Arm, SoftBank Corp. and T-Mobile.

-Sharon Chen, analyst

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SoftBank received T-Mobile shares with the completion of the US telecom company’s $26.5 billion acquisition of Sprint Corp. in April 2020. Later that year, SoftBank substantially reduced its stake in T-Mobile via a $21 billion deal that helped pay for a record buyback of SoftBank’s shares.