Credit for Survival: SoftBank Increases Debt to $21B for OpenAI Infrastructure

The financial foundation of artificial intelligence is built on borrowed funds. On September 18, 2026, Bloomberg confirmed that the Japanese corporation SoftBank Group is urgently ramping up debt financing, increasing the volume of raised funds to nearly $21 billion (via margin loans backed by Arm shares).

The goal of this unprecedented leverage is to finance its stake in OpenAI and secure hardware purchases. The industry has reached a frightening macroeconomic milestone: venture capital is no longer sufficient to pay the electricity and server bills. The technological race is sucking liquidity out of institutional banks. Masayoshi Son's (SoftBank) strategy is simple: put all chips on the winner (OpenAI). If chatbots and autonomous agents do not start generating trillion-dollar revenues in the coming years, this debt-fueled AI bubble will crash markets harder than the dot-com bust.

Source: SoftBank / Bloomberg