According to people familiar with the matter, SoftBank Group is in advanced discussions to commit as much as $30 billion more to OpenAI, potentially bringing its total funding commitment toward the startup’s $100 billion target. If completed, this allocation would substantially exceed SoftBank’s previous AI investments and underscore its strategic pivot toward backing leading‐edge generative AI. The talks, reported by the Wall Street Journal, follow SoftBank’s prior participation in OpenAI’s $10 billion funding round in 2023 and align with CEO Masayoshi Son’s stated ambition to build a global ecosystem around AI research and commercialization. Investors will be watching both the structure of the deal—whether it takes the form of equity, convertible instruments or partnership revenue agreements—and any attendant governance rights, as those terms will shape SoftBank’s influence over product roadmaps and OpenAI’s go-to-market strategies.

In a separate development, SoftBank Group’s telecommunications subsidiary, SoftBank Corp., has moved into a multi‐phase validation of Eye-Net Mobile’s vehicle-to-everything (V2X) collision prediction technology. Under this strategic collaboration, SoftBank and Eye-Net will conduct on-road trials in urban centers across Japan, leveraging existing cellular networks to deliver real-time pre-collision alerts via smartphone and in-vehicle systems. The initiative builds on a successful proof-of-concept that achieved a 40% reduction in near-miss events during initial testing. Over the coming quarters, the partners aim to refine AI-driven analytics, expand coverage to include vulnerable road users such as cyclists and pedestrians, and develop commercialization pathways for integration into fleet management and shared-mobility platforms. For SoftBank Group investors, this represents a tangible step toward monetizing 5G and edge-compute assets in the rapidly growing connected mobility market, projected to exceed $27 billion in annual revenue in Japan by 2028.