> SoftBank said Tuesday it has sold its entire stake in U.S. chipmaker Nvidia for $5.83 billion as the Japanese giant looks to capitalize its “all in” bet on ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
I would have thought that the OpenAI bet is way more risky, because if someone comes along with a better model it could really hurt OpenAI. NVIDIA seems harder to dethrone imo.
They probably know more than us. Such as alternative chips or that the Chinese will go in-house sooner than we think. Nvidia’s moat is not as permanent as people think.
Probably so, but that doesn't mean their value can keep scaling without heavy diminishing returns. Softbank must assume they've taken 80%+ of the gains from this phase of NVIDIA's growth, and want to capture the next wave of growth.
I agree with you that OpenAI seems much more risky in terms of it's actual true viability as a business, but the risk:reward must be there for Softbank.
In many ways OpenAI is transitioning towards an end-user facing product business. They have by far the strongest brand among consumers and are positioning themselves to take on Google/Meta in the ad business.
By proxy, having the strongest frontier model becomes less and less necessary for them and instead building a strong product by properly layering medium-strong models in a cost-efficient way is the priority.
Selling the _entire_ stake sounds really aggressive though? Is that normal?
Even if you're all-in on OpenAI, does it not make financial sense to have _some_ stake in Nvidia considering they are the only ones with an actual moat?
Unless there are CUDA alternative breakthroughs we will hear about in the next few days.
For researchers and academics, cuda is painful to avoid, but I'm not sure that it is for large companies, once the time comes to train and deploy large models.
They recognise that the larger bubble is in the datacenters.
Most of the hardware we are using was designed for computer graphics not AI. Now that China isn't buying Nvidia any longer and actively trying to get their own companies to produce hardware, what happens to all these datacenters when a company produces a device that has 80% of the performance of the current Nvidia hardware but 20% of its power consumption?
Even double the energy consumption is not that bad for half the price. at 20 cents per kWh over 5 years 1 kW load would be 8760. So from 30000 to 15000 you would still come ahead in cost.
I personally wouldn’t put much value on this event. I’ve never been impressed by SoftBank’s investment decisions. Of course, it has a good amount of money. But its decisions on ARM, WeWork, etc., have made it seem like it’s just (uninformed/underinformed) gambling.
By low, sell high. Any Nvidia shareholders would be foolish not to sell at least part of their holdings right now. Don’t ride the bubble to the bottom.
Probably not bad move. How much upside Nvidia has left? And on other side how much can it go down? At point when you do not see them moving much more up selling is the logical conclusion.
> SoftBank said Tuesday it has sold its entire stake in U.S. chipmaker Nvidia for $5.83 billion as the Japanese giant looks to capitalize its “all in” bet on ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
Apparently this is in the wake of OpenAI pivoting to a consumer-facing ad business, away from trying to disrupt every white collar worker on the planet. I would say that still points to a bubble beginning to pop.
> SoftBank Vision Fund recorded a $3.3 billion return on its Nvidia investment. The fund's February 2019 closeout of its Nvidia position preceded the AI boom and Nvidia's rapid transformation into one of the world's most valuable companies.
Masayoshi Son has form when it comes to calling the top of the market with this particular company.
Fun thought experiment: If a company had a product with infinite value it would be irrational to allocate capital to shares since you could own the product instead. So the share price might even go down (it's hard to know what role money will play in a post-agi society).
A smaller scale version of this might be happening here. Or it could be a bubble. Either way it's interesting!
It looks more like a strategic reallocation than a panic exit. Nvidia has already delivered outsized returns, while OpenAI represents a leveraged bet on the next layer of the AI stack - software and services rather than hardware. SoftBank probably sees more upside (and influence) there, even if the risk is higher
We will find out in next few months but I predict they had a great exit at the high. As the AI bubble seems to be deflating even if not popping with the largest economy in the world insulating itself from western tech and AI.
I'm on investing subreddits all the time, and I'd expect it there.
But I don't see how this is "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
If there wasn't an AI bubble narrative, then sure, this this would gratify my curiousity. But now I don't see it, not even in the most charitable way.
I'm curious what the line of thinking is on how this does, in some way, gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Edit: I figured that I'd get all the downvotes. I've been here long enough to understand the social dynamics of the site. Funnily enough, I was more in the "Hacker News" demographic between 2015 and 2023. Since then, it has shifted a little. Nowadays, I have to force myself a bit to sound more positive than I actually am in order for my comments to be appreciated (in terms of upvotes, as I do view that as a form of social feedback), and that is fine.
I understand that this post gives bad vibes or sounds perhaps a bit mean? I am not intending it that way. I really just don't get it. Look at my comment history, I sometimes ask questions like this, but not that often. I suspect I'm not the only one in this.
There is an AI bubble narrative, people are curious when it will burst. This is an indicator that people will want to analyse, discuss, and think about (intellectually).
I see. I guess I simply think that Softbank isn't a good indicator for that. To me, they don't seem better than any other investment company that puts their money into technology stocks with a growth narrative. For example, they invested in WeWork and FTX.
They don't know the future, just like the rest of us.
If we're talking indicators, if 5 Softbanks would do it in rapid succession one after another it just mentions to me that the "smart money" is showing signs of moving out.
In terms of whether AI will or will not fuel growth, I think it will fuel growth. Self-driving cars seems to be a solved problem for cities at least fairly soon (e.g. Waymo, anti-example: Tesla, camera's is not the way).
It's a question whether LLMs state of the art models will grow more, but what hasn't been done that well yet is integrating it into current software. I know, because in part, that's my job. There's still a huge productivity unlock there, also in ways that people can't fully imagine.
Right now, LLMs seem to be an enabler for software engineers, especially software engineers on smaller projects (I can't find the research at the moment, it was a while ago that I read it). It seems to be an enabler for many people, but they do need to put time into prompting it in a way that works for them.
Fixing the context window issues and others I think will be really hard tasks, because I suspect we then need to know what goes on inside the black box.
If an LLM could continuously learn, so somehow continuously keep updating its weights such that it learns better, that would be a breakthrough.
I mean for me it is, but not in an intellectual sense. Don't get me wrong, there are some good articles on HN about HFT and the technicality of it, but this is just, I don't know. Why Softbank? Didn't other big investment banks/funds sold out of NVidia at some point? Cathy Wood maybe, at some point? Why wasn't that on HN?
Stock news is barely on HN.
Oh, wait, I guess I see it now. It is on HN way more frequently when it involves Big Tech. And NVidia is increasingly seen as part of that. It used to be FAANG but now it's the Magnificent 7. The bias shifted.
Note the first line:
> SoftBank said Tuesday it has sold its entire stake in U.S. chipmaker Nvidia for $5.83 billion as the Japanese giant looks to capitalize its “all in” bet on ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
They are switching gears, not exiting, folks.
I would have thought that the OpenAI bet is way more risky, because if someone comes along with a better model it could really hurt OpenAI. NVIDIA seems harder to dethrone imo.
They probably know more than us. Such as alternative chips or that the Chinese will go in-house sooner than we think. Nvidia’s moat is not as permanent as people think.
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Probably so, but that doesn't mean their value can keep scaling without heavy diminishing returns. Softbank must assume they've taken 80%+ of the gains from this phase of NVIDIA's growth, and want to capture the next wave of growth.
I agree with you that OpenAI seems much more risky in terms of it's actual true viability as a business, but the risk:reward must be there for Softbank.
It's SoftBank though, weird risk taking investments seems to be their jam.
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In many ways OpenAI is transitioning towards an end-user facing product business. They have by far the strongest brand among consumers and are positioning themselves to take on Google/Meta in the ad business.
By proxy, having the strongest frontier model becomes less and less necessary for them and instead building a strong product by properly layering medium-strong models in a cost-efficient way is the priority.
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Without a doubt, in my opinion, OpenAI is a risky bet, but perhaps Softbank can make some money on OpenAI and then get out.
They want to profit from the IPO of OpenAI. Private investors get a free 20% - 30% gain not available to the retail investors.
Selling the _entire_ stake sounds really aggressive though? Is that normal?
Even if you're all-in on OpenAI, does it not make financial sense to have _some_ stake in Nvidia considering they are the only ones with an actual moat?
Unless there are CUDA alternative breakthroughs we will hear about in the next few days.
Amazon’s Idaho 2Gw data center it’s building for Anthropic has 0 Nvidia Cuda cores.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-says-anthropic-will-us...
> Anthropic is using 500,000 of Amazon’s Trainium2 chips for its Claude AI models as part of the tech giant's Project Rainier
For researchers and academics, cuda is painful to avoid, but I'm not sure that it is for large companies, once the time comes to train and deploy large models.
Isn't it merely a matter of time before China has an alternative?
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They recognise that the larger bubble is in the datacenters.
Most of the hardware we are using was designed for computer graphics not AI. Now that China isn't buying Nvidia any longer and actively trying to get their own companies to produce hardware, what happens to all these datacenters when a company produces a device that has 80% of the performance of the current Nvidia hardware but 20% of its power consumption?
Even double the energy consumption is not that bad for half the price. at 20 cents per kWh over 5 years 1 kW load would be 8760. So from 30000 to 15000 you would still come ahead in cost.
Maybe they're trying to bail out OpenAI, but that's still not close to the amount they would need to do that. OpenAI needs like 1.3 trillion dollars.
the key is "looks to"
Softbank can also choose not to.
So averaging up then? That's even worse. More like degeneracy and gambling.
There is no craziness here. It's a "Value rotation". Sell high, buy low, repeat. Capture a higher rate of return.
OpenAI just completed separating it's non-profit and for-profit restructuring: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/28/open-ai-for-profit-microsoft...
This probably means the for-profit structure will be going public in 2026, and there is probably a last private round happening.
> Sell high, buy low, repeat.
Softbank is known for doing it the other way around...
I personally wouldn’t put much value on this event. I’ve never been impressed by SoftBank’s investment decisions. Of course, it has a good amount of money. But its decisions on ARM, WeWork, etc., have made it seem like it’s just (uninformed/underinformed) gambling.
Makes no sense to sell their entire position on a key infrastructure player, if you’re going all in on ai. That’s very odd.
By low, sell high. Any Nvidia shareholders would be foolish not to sell at least part of their holdings right now. Don’t ride the bubble to the bottom.
The thing that was a bit surprising to me here is that $5.83B was their entire stake, after NVDA had gone up more that 1000% in the the last 5 years.
I sold third at 180. I have seen it happen so many times in 50 years. You sit on your pile of gold and just watch it slowly disappear.
But also selling ALL is a bad move, says one who sold all of Nokia at 1000 markka in 1996.
Probably not bad move. How much upside Nvidia has left? And on other side how much can it go down? At point when you do not see them moving much more up selling is the logical conclusion.
This should be the news of the day, or even should I say, the news of the last 3 years.
The bubble is starting to crack.
There's no sign of cracking here:
> SoftBank said Tuesday it has sold its entire stake in U.S. chipmaker Nvidia for $5.83 billion as the Japanese giant looks to capitalize its “all in” bet on ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
I think the gulf between what an entity does and what an entity says should at least form part of a measured response to that.
SoftBank selling their stake in the AI shovel company to put it all directly in the AI gold rush company is evidence of bubble starting to crack?
Apparently this is in the wake of OpenAI pivoting to a consumer-facing ad business, away from trying to disrupt every white collar worker on the planet. I would say that still points to a bubble beginning to pop.
A highly-useful autocomplete with a tricky monetization.
> SoftBank Vision Fund recorded a $3.3 billion return on its Nvidia investment. The fund's February 2019 closeout of its Nvidia position preceded the AI boom and Nvidia's rapid transformation into one of the world's most valuable companies.
Masayoshi Son has form when it comes to calling the top of the market with this particular company.
Last top was 2022
Fun thought experiment: If a company had a product with infinite value it would be irrational to allocate capital to shares since you could own the product instead. So the share price might even go down (it's hard to know what role money will play in a post-agi society).
A smaller scale version of this might be happening here. Or it could be a bubble. Either way it's interesting!
It looks more like a strategic reallocation than a panic exit. Nvidia has already delivered outsized returns, while OpenAI represents a leveraged bet on the next layer of the AI stack - software and services rather than hardware. SoftBank probably sees more upside (and influence) there, even if the risk is higher
Good point to cash out in my opinion. Extremely likely you can buy NVDA back cheaper in the future.
$5.83B is too large to be a round trip. This is clearly an exit.
Why would they exit nvidia while still keeping upwards of $10B or whatever it is in OpenAI? Genuine question.
Nvidia current market cap is 4.84 trillion dollars. Yes, that's roughly 5 trillions of dollars. 5.83B is a rounding error.
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Maybe. Could go up still, but a surprisingly conservative move for SoftBank.
But hey, maybe the market crashes tomorrow and this is seen as the best piece of timing ever seen, maybe it doubles in the next year.
In any case, you never lose by taking profit.
I’m not calling the top, but I think it’s incredibly likely we’ll see NVDA with a lower market cap than this in the next 3 years.
Softbank is likely in trouble and needs the cash or something.
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[flagged]
Why are you assuming people around you automatically have the means and desire to invest their own money into risky financial instruments?
This is so weird.
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Related?
https://www.marketbeat.com/instant-alerts/filing-curbstone-f...
https://www.fool.com/investing/2025/11/11/billionaire-stanle...
And all this on a holiday when the markets are closed....
We will find out in next few months but I predict they had a great exit at the high. As the AI bubble seems to be deflating even if not popping with the largest economy in the world insulating itself from western tech and AI.
[dead]
Totally not a bubble [0], Move along now, nothing to see here. /s
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45795158
Well the news should probably be "sold its entire stake", as in it's already over and done.
I was a skeptic in AI crapware, but if SoftBank is selling Nvidia to the moon is almost a guarantee
I'm sorry, why is this on Hacker News?
I'm on investing subreddits all the time, and I'd expect it there.
But I don't see how this is "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
If there wasn't an AI bubble narrative, then sure, this this would gratify my curiousity. But now I don't see it, not even in the most charitable way.
I'm curious what the line of thinking is on how this does, in some way, gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Edit: I figured that I'd get all the downvotes. I've been here long enough to understand the social dynamics of the site. Funnily enough, I was more in the "Hacker News" demographic between 2015 and 2023. Since then, it has shifted a little. Nowadays, I have to force myself a bit to sound more positive than I actually am in order for my comments to be appreciated (in terms of upvotes, as I do view that as a form of social feedback), and that is fine.
I understand that this post gives bad vibes or sounds perhaps a bit mean? I am not intending it that way. I really just don't get it. Look at my comment history, I sometimes ask questions like this, but not that often. I suspect I'm not the only one in this.
I'm curious if this is the beginning of the rumored "pop".
It is not.
There is an AI bubble narrative, people are curious when it will burst. This is an indicator that people will want to analyse, discuss, and think about (intellectually).
I see. I guess I simply think that Softbank isn't a good indicator for that. To me, they don't seem better than any other investment company that puts their money into technology stocks with a growth narrative. For example, they invested in WeWork and FTX.
They don't know the future, just like the rest of us.
If we're talking indicators, if 5 Softbanks would do it in rapid succession one after another it just mentions to me that the "smart money" is showing signs of moving out.
In terms of whether AI will or will not fuel growth, I think it will fuel growth. Self-driving cars seems to be a solved problem for cities at least fairly soon (e.g. Waymo, anti-example: Tesla, camera's is not the way).
It's a question whether LLMs state of the art models will grow more, but what hasn't been done that well yet is integrating it into current software. I know, because in part, that's my job. There's still a huge productivity unlock there, also in ways that people can't fully imagine.
Right now, LLMs seem to be an enabler for software engineers, especially software engineers on smaller projects (I can't find the research at the moment, it was a while ago that I read it). It seems to be an enabler for many people, but they do need to put time into prompting it in a way that works for them.
Fixing the context window issues and others I think will be really hard tasks, because I suspect we then need to know what goes on inside the black box.
If an LLM could continuously learn, so somehow continuously keep updating its weights such that it learns better, that would be a breakthrough.
1 reply →
Stock market is really, really interesting
I mean for me it is, but not in an intellectual sense. Don't get me wrong, there are some good articles on HN about HFT and the technicality of it, but this is just, I don't know. Why Softbank? Didn't other big investment banks/funds sold out of NVidia at some point? Cathy Wood maybe, at some point? Why wasn't that on HN?
Stock news is barely on HN.
Oh, wait, I guess I see it now. It is on HN way more frequently when it involves Big Tech. And NVidia is increasingly seen as part of that. It used to be FAANG but now it's the Magnificent 7. The bias shifted.
That'd make sense.
2 replies →