> 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.
> 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.
This is Softbank though, they're not really noted for great investment decisions (apart from Alibaba really early on).
Like, my prior is that when Softbank invest in something, the growth is done (but then I am, very much, a cynic).
Not to mention the US companies probably want to develop their own chips to get away from Nvidia too. I don’t really see why any company would want to base their entire business on the whims of nvidia.
Nvidia's moat is their pace of performance growth, which is hardware + software + cultural.
If they skip a beat, or it becomes impossible to increase performance (TSMC node stumble or P4-style dead-end), then it won't take long for someone to catch up.
If they keep executing on better hardware performance + software to support it? They keep the money spigot on.
People are saying that nvidia doesn't have any moat for 20 years. And nvidia hasn't been dethroned, but grown into the largest company in the world in the meantime.
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.
I'd argue their brand might be too strong, ChatGPT has already begun to enter the same semantic space as "Velcro". Everyone I know seems to have tried it yet quickly you begin to realize that for most people ChatGPT == LLM, it seems everyone is using "ChatGPT" on completely different platforms.
In the end, regardless of technical understanding, people will always shop around on price if the feature set is similar enough I suppose.
Just like Blackberry, but instead of having to buy an new device to switch to the competition, the customer just needs to click on a different website.
Not a great analogy. Blackberry was never really for mass consumers and was always business-first. They lost to Apple because Apple won the mass market, and the mass market overwhelmed the specific niche business use-case that was BB.
OpenAI is already the consumer-first AI platform. And, in my opinion, in the minds of the average consumer, the biggest one that is "an app" with memory and folders, vs. something like Gemini which is perceived as an extension of Google Search and thus doesn't have the same "knowledge database" UI.
This argument regarding brand loyalty gets repeated but it’s really weak to me. The immense majority of people don’t tie their identity to the software services they are using. Without network effects or an ecosystem locking customers will switch as soon as there is a less expensive and/or better alternative, as the history of software has shown countless of times.
Keep in mind how severely the quality of Google search results or e.g. any consumer facing piece of Microsoft software (Windows, Office, OneDrive, etc.) have deteriorated to the point it has far transcended the more nerdy corners of the web, yet both continue to retain a strict grip, thanks to buy in/brand strength.
There's no viable alternative for either of those yet. Massive network effects around Microsoft office, and Google's only real competition is the equally-bad Bing.
Both DuckDuckGo and Kagi are, purely focused on result quality in 2025 far better than Google currently, but that does not matter if one has no need beyond the most basic results.
And much of the MS Office suite is actually a worse copy of another product, merely copied and forced via network effect. There are more than enough far better alternatives to e.g. Teams and OneDrive. The latter even makes Excel far less reliable to the point of unusability.
Not to mention Windows is easily replaced for the truly average person who spends their entire computer use inside a Chromium browser nowadays. Outside PC Gaming (which is far from the average if we are honest), the vast majority of people never touch software that isn’t already on mobile or more likely exclusively in the browser.
Familiarity and brand strength, not need or compatibility, keep the customer facing offerings of MSFT going. That isn’t inherently unreasonable either, for these people Windows is fine as Chrome works well enough on it and they do not have any needs beyond that, so why switch. Same with search, Google still finds flights, restaurants, Wikipedia, etc.
Being better is worth little if the vast majority are sufficiently well catered to by the incumbent. Even if another OS or search may improve their experience somewhat (better reliability, longer battery life, etc.) that doesn’t trounce the established player as long as the few basics aren’t utterly broken even to them.
You can actively antagonize your users, be worse than the competition, more expensive too, you only loose most if you make the few things most have purely become reliant on and are expecting worse, basically regress.
Reason all the bugs in Windows are fine, after all the memories of most people are dominated by BSODs and just not crashing daily is enough to be considered pretty good, despite the overall experience far worse than most other OS/DE combis.
no but there’s the network effect that Google has / once had with search that OpenAI has with ChatGPT: user interactions. all that data and classification will help tremendously getting better datasets, which is equally important (or more important) than better algorithms.
If it was OpenAI vs Claude then yeah, ChatGPT is known whereas Claude you have to be an enthusiast to know.
But everyone using Google runs into Gemini and everyone using X runs into Grok, and people talk. Now even the laypeople know there is more than one AI, and they're from big brands that they trust. Which means that people will window shop for the AI with the best performance per cost. Bye bye brand power.
In fairness, that is for their model, not their brand. In this industry, the mind share and buy in OpenAI has is still second to none, even when Gemini 2.5 Pro served the vast majority of users far better than the OpenAI models, the latter MAU trounced all competitors.
We do not know for certain as of yet, but I’d be very surprised if Apple felt the need to loudly communicate to their user base that the upcoming Siri improvements aren’t Apple Intelligence. They won’t lie of course, but Googles brand in the space isn’t nearly as strong with the layperson, whereas they more than happily shouted their use of GPT from the rooftops initially.
I can see a world where if everything they do pans out, on average 1B "entities" end up paying 20$/mo to openAI, via the myriad of integrations they end up supporting. Where entity can be a user, and one human can have many entities (i.e. a work account where the company pays, a personal account, etc). That'd be a quarter of a T$ revenue / year. Dunno, while the number is so large it's hard to compute, it somewhat seems plausible.
If they are able to actually successfully pivot into ads as a business model, it's very easy to justify the valuation: Just look at Google/Meta.
I'm personally skeptical that they are able to pull off ads, at least on the short timescale they likely need to. They more or less have to nurture/disrupt a whole SEO industry, and the way big corps allocate advertising budgets are very slow to shift (many are still struggling to find their footing in social media advertising).
> If they are able to actually successfully pivot into ads as a business model, it's very easy to justify the valuation: Just look at Google/Meta.
Ads are not just a switch one can turn on. Firstly, you need to build a decent ad serving/targeting/pacing engine. Secondly (and more importantly) you need to hire a shed ton of sales people (in many, many geos) and then ramp them all up (difficult if you're building the product at the same time).
And then you need to keep at it for 3-5 years minimum before you'll finally get the bigger/more conservative brands/agencies/etc to buy in properly.
At that point, you'll make decent money, after accounting for all of the costs. I'm not sure that you'll make enough money, but it would definitely stanch their bleeding a little.
tl;dr if they haven't already built this ad product, it's unlikely to make a material difference before 2030.
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.
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.
All you have to look at is ASIC miners. Once they had them, they were 10x faster than GPUs easily and made GPUs useless for those algos. Something very similar can happen soon.
The fundamentals are different. Bitcoin mining is not intrinsically suited to acceleration on a GPU. It is a not-very-wide serial integer operation.
AI inference on the other hand is basically just very large floating point tensor matrix multiplication. What does an ASIC for matmul look like? A GPU.
This was sponsored by AMD for quite a while and dropped. There had to be some talks behind closed doors that resulted in the current situation. I mean, we all know they should've and they're not dumb either.
lol, after wework you'd be an idiot to think it was nothing more than shilling their "winner" to potentially dump on the public. but i guess as long as you can make money on the way up.
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.
In the game of musical chairs, there is no official moment when players need to get in position to reach the closest chair. One second there is music and another second later there isn't. However, the that period exists if you can look at the relevant signs: the host hand and body in relation to the music record player.
No AI player will admit to be positioning for a sector collapse but it would be naïve to believe that anyone close to ground zero isn't planning contingency plans and are just coasting in the golden age of AI. And those who have the most skin in the game are certainly the ones most incentivise to do so while denying their true intentions.
LLMs are going no where but the reality of them not being the civilisation shifting money makers people have hyped them up to be is undeniably setting no matter what the AI astroturfers hiding in HN tell you. People have been jumping off the train or positioning to reach the closest chair when the music stops. Not long ago 2023, the world bubble was just whispered here. 2 years later it has hit mainstream and has been uttered by people holding the money bags. It might be a dream or it might not.
The difference is that, if you were in denial, now you are seeing signs that are much harder to deny. And we should expect the upcoming signs to be harder and harder, until the number of people denying reaches to zero right as the bubble fully bursts and the AI startups layoffs begin.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
Hahah! Fucking hell, openai is going to fail big time, they have nearly a 1,5 TRILLION USD in debt. There is no way they can handle that, their only option is to cozy up with trumo and make the tax payers pay for all that.
Ah, because you didn't post any sort of source I looked it up.
Seems your 1.5Tn figure is in "spending commitments" and not current/hard debts. I.e. budget earmarked for datacenters and research from '25-'35 or so.
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!
In numbers, yes, a rounding error. In fact, SoftBank was one of Nvidia's backers, and whatever this sell means in the stock markets, this is a strong signal.
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 agree to be fair. I see Softbanks move as just wise strategy. Nvidia's growth won't be uncapped.
I wouldn't be surprised if they reinvest some of that money into AMD or similar, as those companies play catch up. AMD is bringing ROCM up to speed with AI models, and their consumer hardware is having pretty good press despite some PR fumbles.
Selling Nvidia stock isn't a sign of lack of faith, it's just an exit after strong results. Softbank think this is a peak or near enough, good for them.
As you say, until there's some breakthrough, there's little point keeping money in the dominant company.
Also, Nvidia appear to have delayed their 60-series GPUs, and this will cascade to their entreprise models, due to the 3GB module memory shortage. The next gen will be VRAM heavy, but you can't do that during a shortage, you need the market to correct tor for supply to increase. So any 'breakthrough' powered by new hardware is now about a year away.
This won't stop people secondguessing on the bubble front though. Personally, I think bubble popping is going to come from a lack of faith from investors in the downstream companies like OpenAI who are struggling to make money from their resource intensive products. Nvidia are already profitable with the hardware, MS/Google/Amazon will always make money with the servers. And if AI bursts, other sectors can soften the blow for those companies. It's the massively inflated AI model makers that need to worry about who makes it out of this profitably.
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.
After reddit doing IPO and getting blasted by AI content, seems a lot of reddit-only people have come over to HN.
Quality of technical content and discussions has visibly gone down since. More emotional/low-value/political replies everywhere. Slowly turning into /r/programmerhumor...
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.
> 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.
This is Softbank though, they're not really noted for great investment decisions (apart from Alibaba really early on).
Like, my prior is that when Softbank invest in something, the growth is done (but then I am, very much, a cynic).
Not to mention the US companies probably want to develop their own chips to get away from Nvidia too. I don’t really see why any company would want to base their entire business on the whims of nvidia.
Given how poorly Intel and AMD have fared, it suggests the hardware moat is much deeper than the software one.
Nvidia's moat is their pace of performance growth, which is hardware + software + cultural.
If they skip a beat, or it becomes impossible to increase performance (TSMC node stumble or P4-style dead-end), then it won't take long for someone to catch up.
If they keep executing on better hardware performance + software to support it? They keep the money spigot on.
People are saying that nvidia doesn't have any moat for 20 years. And nvidia hasn't been dethroned, but grown into the largest company in the world in the meantime.
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.
I'd argue their brand might be too strong, ChatGPT has already begun to enter the same semantic space as "Velcro". Everyone I know seems to have tried it yet quickly you begin to realize that for most people ChatGPT == LLM, it seems everyone is using "ChatGPT" on completely different platforms.
In the end, regardless of technical understanding, people will always shop around on price if the feature set is similar enough I suppose.
> They have by far the strongest brand
Just like Blackberry, but instead of having to buy an new device to switch to the competition, the customer just needs to click on a different website.
Not a great analogy. Blackberry was never really for mass consumers and was always business-first. They lost to Apple because Apple won the mass market, and the mass market overwhelmed the specific niche business use-case that was BB.
OpenAI is already the consumer-first AI platform. And, in my opinion, in the minds of the average consumer, the biggest one that is "an app" with memory and folders, vs. something like Gemini which is perceived as an extension of Google Search and thus doesn't have the same "knowledge database" UI.
This argument regarding brand loyalty gets repeated but it’s really weak to me. The immense majority of people don’t tie their identity to the software services they are using. Without network effects or an ecosystem locking customers will switch as soon as there is a less expensive and/or better alternative, as the history of software has shown countless of times.
Keep in mind how severely the quality of Google search results or e.g. any consumer facing piece of Microsoft software (Windows, Office, OneDrive, etc.) have deteriorated to the point it has far transcended the more nerdy corners of the web, yet both continue to retain a strict grip, thanks to buy in/brand strength.
There's no viable alternative for either of those yet. Massive network effects around Microsoft office, and Google's only real competition is the equally-bad Bing.
Both DuckDuckGo and Kagi are, purely focused on result quality in 2025 far better than Google currently, but that does not matter if one has no need beyond the most basic results.
And much of the MS Office suite is actually a worse copy of another product, merely copied and forced via network effect. There are more than enough far better alternatives to e.g. Teams and OneDrive. The latter even makes Excel far less reliable to the point of unusability.
Not to mention Windows is easily replaced for the truly average person who spends their entire computer use inside a Chromium browser nowadays. Outside PC Gaming (which is far from the average if we are honest), the vast majority of people never touch software that isn’t already on mobile or more likely exclusively in the browser.
Familiarity and brand strength, not need or compatibility, keep the customer facing offerings of MSFT going. That isn’t inherently unreasonable either, for these people Windows is fine as Chrome works well enough on it and they do not have any needs beyond that, so why switch. Same with search, Google still finds flights, restaurants, Wikipedia, etc.
Being better is worth little if the vast majority are sufficiently well catered to by the incumbent. Even if another OS or search may improve their experience somewhat (better reliability, longer battery life, etc.) that doesn’t trounce the established player as long as the few basics aren’t utterly broken even to them.
You can actively antagonize your users, be worse than the competition, more expensive too, you only loose most if you make the few things most have purely become reliant on and are expecting worse, basically regress.
Reason all the bugs in Windows are fine, after all the memories of most people are dominated by BSODs and just not crashing daily is enough to be considered pretty good, despite the overall experience far worse than most other OS/DE combis.
no but there’s the network effect that Google has / once had with search that OpenAI has with ChatGPT: user interactions. all that data and classification will help tremendously getting better datasets, which is equally important (or more important) than better algorithms.
> They have by far the strongest brand
They don't really, because of Gemini and Grok.
If it was OpenAI vs Claude then yeah, ChatGPT is known whereas Claude you have to be an enthusiast to know.
But everyone using Google runs into Gemini and everyone using X runs into Grok, and people talk. Now even the laypeople know there is more than one AI, and they're from big brands that they trust. Which means that people will window shop for the AI with the best performance per cost. Bye bye brand power.
Does anyone trust Xitter? If so, they shouldn't.
why?
It’s going be pretty hard to dethrone Google when even Apple is going to Google for AI with another huge billion $ contract.
In fairness, that is for their model, not their brand. In this industry, the mind share and buy in OpenAI has is still second to none, even when Gemini 2.5 Pro served the vast majority of users far better than the OpenAI models, the latter MAU trounced all competitors.
We do not know for certain as of yet, but I’d be very surprised if Apple felt the need to loudly communicate to their user base that the upcoming Siri improvements aren’t Apple Intelligence. They won’t lie of course, but Googles brand in the space isn’t nearly as strong with the layperson, whereas they more than happily shouted their use of GPT from the rooftops initially.
It's hard to see how they become profitable enough to justify current valuations.
The numbers are just mind boggling even in the optimistic scenario.
I can see a world where if everything they do pans out, on average 1B "entities" end up paying 20$/mo to openAI, via the myriad of integrations they end up supporting. Where entity can be a user, and one human can have many entities (i.e. a work account where the company pays, a personal account, etc). That'd be a quarter of a T$ revenue / year. Dunno, while the number is so large it's hard to compute, it somewhat seems plausible.
And then they'll ruin it all by injecting adverts to get an extra $20b a year in revenue
If they are able to actually successfully pivot into ads as a business model, it's very easy to justify the valuation: Just look at Google/Meta.
I'm personally skeptical that they are able to pull off ads, at least on the short timescale they likely need to. They more or less have to nurture/disrupt a whole SEO industry, and the way big corps allocate advertising budgets are very slow to shift (many are still struggling to find their footing in social media advertising).
> If they are able to actually successfully pivot into ads as a business model, it's very easy to justify the valuation: Just look at Google/Meta.
Ads are not just a switch one can turn on. Firstly, you need to build a decent ad serving/targeting/pacing engine. Secondly (and more importantly) you need to hire a shed ton of sales people (in many, many geos) and then ramp them all up (difficult if you're building the product at the same time).
And then you need to keep at it for 3-5 years minimum before you'll finally get the bigger/more conservative brands/agencies/etc to buy in properly.
At that point, you'll make decent money, after accounting for all of the costs. I'm not sure that you'll make enough money, but it would definitely stanch their bleeding a little.
tl;dr if they haven't already built this ad product, it's unlikely to make a material difference before 2030.
It's SoftBank though, weird risk taking investments seems to be their jam.
That's how you get to have $6B to throw around on just one part of one your strategies though to be fair.
It's because they are playing with other (dumb) people's money.
Yea, I was thinking the same thing.
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.
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?
All you have to look at is ASIC miners. Once they had them, they were 10x faster than GPUs easily and made GPUs useless for those algos. Something very similar can happen soon.
The fundamentals are different. Bitcoin mining is not intrinsically suited to acceleration on a GPU. It is a not-very-wide serial integer operation.
AI inference on the other hand is basically just very large floating point tensor matrix multiplication. What does an ASIC for matmul look like? A GPU.
Sorta? If that was the full story, TPU would not be a thing.
Asic for matmul is systolic array more or less
They don't even need to invent anything. Just put in some work to polish what already exists: https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA
IMHO AMD should have done this a decade ago.
This was sponsored by AMD for quite a while and dropped. There had to be some talks behind closed doors that resulted in the current situation. I mean, we all know they should've and they're not dumb either.
lol, after wework you'd be an idiot to think it was nothing more than shilling their "winner" to potentially dump on the public. but i guess as long as you can make money on the way up.
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...
In the game of musical chairs, there is no official moment when players need to get in position to reach the closest chair. One second there is music and another second later there isn't. However, the that period exists if you can look at the relevant signs: the host hand and body in relation to the music record player.
No AI player will admit to be positioning for a sector collapse but it would be naïve to believe that anyone close to ground zero isn't planning contingency plans and are just coasting in the golden age of AI. And those who have the most skin in the game are certainly the ones most incentivise to do so while denying their true intentions.
LLMs are going no where but the reality of them not being the civilisation shifting money makers people have hyped them up to be is undeniably setting no matter what the AI astroturfers hiding in HN tell you. People have been jumping off the train or positioning to reach the closest chair when the music stops. Not long ago 2023, the world bubble was just whispered here. 2 years later it has hit mainstream and has been uttered by people holding the money bags. It might be a dream or it might not.
The difference is that, if you were in denial, now you are seeing signs that are much harder to deny. And we should expect the upcoming signs to be harder and harder, until the number of people denying reaches to zero right as the bubble fully bursts and the AI startups layoffs begin.
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.
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.
Sure, there is no sign.
-3% straight after opening of the stock market 20 min ago.
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?
> to put it all directly in the AI gold rush company
There are 3 facts here:
1. Softbank's nvidia stake sale has happened
2. Softbank has not put it all directly into the AI gold rush
3. 2 other investment entities have also sold most/all their stake in Nvidia
Do what these 3 facts as you will but these are ripples in the surface of the tech world
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.
If virtualization and cloud computing has shown us anything, it's that software is more profitable than hardware.
The question is: now that Nvidia is the new Intel, is OpenAI the new Microsoft?
Softbank clearly thinks so.
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.
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
> 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
The surprising thing 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.
"All in on OpenAI"
Hahah! Fucking hell, openai is going to fail big time, they have nearly a 1,5 TRILLION USD in debt. There is no way they can handle that, their only option is to cozy up with trumo and make the tax payers pay for all that.
Ah, because you didn't post any sort of source I looked it up.
Seems your 1.5Tn figure is in "spending commitments" and not current/hard debts. I.e. budget earmarked for datacenters and research from '25-'35 or so.
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!
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.
In numbers, yes, a rounding error. In fact, SoftBank was one of Nvidia's backers, and whatever this sell means in the stock markets, this is a strong signal.
Market capitalization is not equal to real money. Take a look at how Elon Musk bought Twitter.
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.
SoftBank, according to its stock, is in the best shape ever.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SFTBY/
And per the stock prices Tesla is worth more than every other car manufacturer ever, as well.
Until it wasn’t. Then it was again.
Either way, cash flow != stock price, not that SoftBank is in a ‘business’ that likely needs a lot of cash.
Maybe they just needed a new yacht?
Or need to bail out one of their investments?
Interesting - is buying SoftBank a proxy for owning some OpenAI at this point ?
I thought Nvidia was the proxy!
It's proxies all the way down
... to reverse proxy
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.
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.
I agree to be fair. I see Softbanks move as just wise strategy. Nvidia's growth won't be uncapped.
I wouldn't be surprised if they reinvest some of that money into AMD or similar, as those companies play catch up. AMD is bringing ROCM up to speed with AI models, and their consumer hardware is having pretty good press despite some PR fumbles.
Selling Nvidia stock isn't a sign of lack of faith, it's just an exit after strong results. Softbank think this is a peak or near enough, good for them.
As you say, until there's some breakthrough, there's little point keeping money in the dominant company.
Also, Nvidia appear to have delayed their 60-series GPUs, and this will cascade to their entreprise models, due to the 3GB module memory shortage. The next gen will be VRAM heavy, but you can't do that during a shortage, you need the market to correct tor for supply to increase. So any 'breakthrough' powered by new hardware is now about a year away.
This won't stop people secondguessing on the bubble front though. Personally, I think bubble popping is going to come from a lack of faith from investors in the downstream companies like OpenAI who are struggling to make money from their resource intensive products. Nvidia are already profitable with the hardware, MS/Google/Amazon will always make money with the servers. And if AI bursts, other sectors can soften the blow for those companies. It's the massively inflated AI model makers that need to worry about who makes it out of this profitably.
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.
After reddit doing IPO and getting blasted by AI content, seems a lot of reddit-only people have come over to HN.
Quality of technical content and discussions has visibly gone down since. More emotional/low-value/political replies everywhere. Slowly turning into /r/programmerhumor...
> Why Softbank?
most of HN bought their houses on the back of softbank throwing money at everything that moved