Japanese SoftBank is in talks for a massive investment in the developer of ChatGPT.

Japanese company SoftBank may become the largest financial partner of American OpenAI and is in talks to invest between $15 billion and $25 billion in the ChatGPT developer.

Sources from Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal reported this.

Part of this funding is likely to be directed by OpenAI towards supporting its major artificial intelligence development initiative, Stargate, which is valued at $500 billion. This project involves CEO Sam Altman, SoftBank chairman Masayoshi Son, and Oracle's Larry Ellison.

So far, the largest investor in OpenAI has been Microsoft, which has invested nearly $14 billion.

If the deal goes through, SoftBank's stake in commercial OpenAI LP will be smaller than Microsoft's, as the latter entered the project earlier, but Altman and Son will be able to deepen their business partnership, notes WSJ.

Over the past year, their relationship has notably strengthened, particularly amidst discussions about Altman's plans to transform the global semiconductor industry.

As SoftBank draws closer, the partnership with Microsoft is weakening – specifically, in January, Microsoft ceased to be the exclusive cloud services provider for OpenAI.

Background. Meanwhile, it has been revealed that Chinese company Alibaba recently unveiled an artificial intelligence model that it claims is superior to DeepSeek, which has shaken the market with its assertions about the low cost of AI chatbot technology.