SoftBank’s Eleven Billion Dollar Gamble: When AI Hype Meets Bond Market Reality
I have watched Masayoshi Son roll the dice for decades, but his latest manoeuvre feels distinctively precarious. SoftBank has just tapped the bond markets for a staggering 11.1 billion dollars, largely to bankroll its deepening courtship of OpenAI.
This is not spare change dredged up from between the sofa cushions.
To me, it feels uncomfortably like remortgaging the family home to purchase an astonishingly expensive racehorse. The Silicon Valley crowd loves to preach the gospel of infinite machine intelligence, yet nobody seems keen to mention that computing power is shockingly, brutally cash-hungry. When cash reserves run thin, you reach for the credit card.