SoftBank is in talks to invest up to $25 billion in OpenAI, potentially matching Microsoft as the AI company's largest investor.
Sources say SoftBank plans to invest between $15 and $25 billion directly in OpenAI, on top of more than $15 billion already committed to their joint Stargate project. This could bring SoftBank's total investment to $40 billion. For SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son, this would mark one of his largest deals yet, following the company's $2 billion investment in OpenAI last year.
The investment would put SoftBank on par with Microsoft as a major backer of the ChatGPT maker, which was recently valued at $157 billion.
Microsoft hosts Deepseek R1 on Azure
Meanwhile, Microsoft has added the AI model R1 from Chinese startup Deepseek to its Azure AI Foundry platform and GitHub. Microsoft's plans, however, extend beyond cloud services: The company will offer an optimized version of R1 directly on Windows PCs equipped with a Neural Processing Unit (NPU). They'll start with a 1.5 billion-parameter version for Qualcomm Snapdragon X chips, followed by 7 and 14 billion-parameter versions for Intel processors.
This partnership comes at an interesting time, as both OpenAI and Microsoft are looking into whether Deepseek might have used OpenAI's API to train its models. Late last year, Microsoft's security team noticed large amounts of data being accessed through OpenAI developer accounts, possibly linked to Deepseek.
Deepseek caused US financial markets to drop sharply this week, as R1 can be trained and run much more cheaply than leading OpenAI models. Stock prices of US AI chipmakers like Nvidia fell by double digits after Deepseek's cost advantages came to light. Nvidia lost about $589 billion in market value - the biggest single-day loss for any US company in history, according to the Financial Times.
