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Japan’s technology investor SoftBank Group sees profitability return on AI boom

TOKYO (AP) — Japanese technology and telecoms giant SoftBank Group Corp. swung back into profitability in the last quarter of 2025 as its investments in OpenAI and other ventures paid off, the company said Thursday.

SoftBank Group reported a 248.6 billion yen ($1.62 billion) profit for the October-December period, a reversal from 369 billion yen in losses racked up in the same quarter a year earlier.

Quarterly sales rose 8% to 1.98 trillion yen ($12.9 billion).

Tokyo-based SoftBank Group sold its stake in Nvidia for $5.8 billion in October, in line with its focus on artificial intelligence.

It has invested nearly $35 billion in OpenAI, the developer of the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, for an ownership interest of about 11%, which has brought investments gains, the company said.

Among other investments, last year SoftBank Group acquired Ampere, a U.S.-based semiconductor design company, for $6.5 billion, after which it became a wholly owned U.S. subsidiary.

Another interest is robotics. SoftBank Group reached an agreement with ABB last year to acquire its robotics business for $5.375 billion. The deal still needs regulatory approval, including in Europe, China and the U.S.

For the nine months through December, SoftBank Group posted a 3.17 trillion yen ($20.7 billion) profit, about five times what it recorded in the previous year. Nine-month sales edged up nearly 8% to 5.7 trillion yen ($37 billion).

SoftBank generally does not release annual profit forecasts.

“Our investments are beginning to pay off,” SoftBank Group’s chief financial officer, Yoshimitsu Goto, told reporters.

He stressed the gains were coming not just from OpenAI but from a variety of investments, including in Arm, an AI semiconductor company.

SoftBank’s financial performance tends to be erratic because it is an aggressive investor in innovative, often fledgling, technology.

Although its banking on OpenAI appears to have paid off so far, some analysts caution that counting too much on OpenAI could be risky.

SoftBank Group shares rose 2.4% on Thursday.

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Yuri Kageyama is on Threads: https://www.threads.com/@yurikageyama

Beijing bans 4 New Zealand lawmakers from entering China because they visited Taiwan

By WTOP Staff
WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — Beijing banned four New Zealand lawmakers from traveling to China for a year and demanded they apologize because they visited Taiwan on a parliamentary trip, according to a message from the Chinese embassy conveyed via parliamentary officials and shown to The Associated Press on Thursday. China has hit lawmakers from other countries with sanctions related to contact with Taiwan before, but it's the first time for New Zealand parliamentarians, the government in Wellington said. Beijing has been increasing pressure in recent years on the democratically governed island that it claims as its own territory. Two lawmakers reached by the AP on Thursday rejected the demand for an apology, while the other two could not be immediately reached. New Zealand's government said it would express concern about the travel bans to Beijing. The elected officials visited Taipei in May, as New Zealand parliamentarians have done “for decades,” a spokesperson for Foreign Minister Winston Peters said in a statement.
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