SoftBank is the world’s biggest technology investment management group, and it’s just pulled its entire $5.83 billion stake out of Nvidia, according to Bloomberg. It has reportedly sold all these shares to help bankroll its continued investments into AI.
This was followed by its own share price sliding, but that’s only by a few dollars so far, putting the company back to where it was just a few days ago, before a climb after reporting its stellar profits of over $16 billion [PDF warning] yesterday.
In other words, SoftBank reported high profits and its share price climbed, then almost immediately dumped its Nvidia stocks, and its price dipped again. Nvidia’s share price also dipped a little, too, after SoftBank shed stocks.
SoftBank has already said it’s attempting to position itself as “the organiser of the industry in the artificial superintelligence era”, investing heavily into AI companies, for instance pledging a $40 billion investment into OpenAI earlier in the year. It looks like the company is continuing this push by selling off as much as it can to keep pumping money into AI superscalers and providers.
One might initially consider that SoftBank is, in some way, betting against Nvidia. And this, not long after the guy who correctly predicted the World Financial Crisis, placed a $1 billion bet against the chipmaker.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang holding the first Blackwell Wafer to come out of TSMC Arizona, next to the TSMC Arizona CEO and other execs. (Image credit: Nvidia)
The thing is, though, all these companies seem to feed back into each other, so I’m not sure it will ultimately make much difference to Nvidia—which is still the richest company in the world, by the way, with a market cap of over $4.6 trillion at the time of writing.
Any AI provider that SoftBank ends up investing in will almost certainly use Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, so in some ways, this is just an indirect reinvestment into Nvidia. It is, of course, not that straightforward, as purchasing a company’s products isn’t the same as buying its stocks, but the money is still flowing in Team Green’s direction.
Many believe that the AI industry is a bubble, and that this bubble may, indeed, burst. And a big part of what contributes to the idea that it’s a bubble is this interrelated nature of investment within the industry. That Nvidia might indirectly benefit from SoftBank’s diverted investments isn’t quite the same as this, though, because that relationship isn’t circular in the same way that Nvidia investing in OpenAI and OpenAI buying Nvidia’s GPUs is.
Whatever the case, I don’t think we need to worry about Nvidia. The ‘small indie company’ joke is overused but very apt, here: the company will be just fine.
