SoftBank Group is back at the negotiating table with a banking syndicate, this time offering its own corporate guarantee to secure a $10 billion margin loan backed by its OpenAI shares. It's a concession the banks demanded, and a sign of just how deep SoftBank's debt hole has become.
The urgency? On July 1st, SoftBank drew down a bridge loan from March to complete its second $10 billion tranche of investment into OpenAI. With over $60 billion committed to OpenAI and related infrastructure, SoftBank is leaning hard on debt — and facing a hard deadline: $40 billion in bridge loans that must be repaid by March 2027.
Banks like Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Mizuho were initially wary of taking only OpenAI shares as collateral — valuing private company stock is tricky, and selling it isn't easy. SoftBank's offer of a corporate guarantee means that if the shares lose value, the banks can go after SoftBank directly.
There's one potential lifeline: OpenAI secretly filed for a US IPO in June 2026. If that moves forward, it could make the collateral much more liquid — and give SoftBank some much-needed breathing room in its debt cycle.