SoftBank’s latest rally was sudden, sharp and driven by renewed excitement around artificial intelligence.
The Japanese investment group added roughly $35 billion in market value on Thursday after a near-20% surge, then extended gains on Friday as investors chased exposure to Nvidia, Arm and the prospect of an OpenAI listing.
The question now is whether this is a genuine re-rating or another AI sugar rush.
3 reasons why SoftBank stock is skyrocketing
The rally had three clear triggers.
First came Nvidia as the chipmaker reported record quarterly revenue of $81.6 billion, up 85% from a year earlier, reinforcing the market’s belief that spending on AI infrastructure is still accelerating rather than peaking.
That mattered for SoftBank because the company is not just another tech holding company.
Through Arm, and through its enormous bet on OpenAI, it has become one of the cleanest public-market proxies for the AI buildout.
Then Arm stock caught fire.
SoftBank’s chip-design crown jewel was up more than 16% on Friday, with investors treating Arm as a structural beneficiary of demand for AI servers and data centres.
SoftBank remains heavily tied to Arm’s market value, so any sharp move in Arm quickly changes the optics around SoftBank’s own asset value.
The third catalyst was the biggest: OpenAI.
The ChatGPT maker is reportedly preparing a confidential US IPO filing in the coming weeks, possibly as soon as Friday, and is working with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.
For Andrew Jackson of Ortus Advisors, that IPO optimism is the connective tissue in the rally: it gives investors a way to link Nvidia’s demand signal, Arm’s valuation and SoftBank’s private-market AI exposure into one trade.
Why is the bull case still strong?
The optimistic reading is that SoftBank is not rallying on hype alone.
The company has just reported record annual profit with net profit for the year to March reaching ¥5 trillion, the highest ever for a Japanese company, helped by gains on OpenAI.
SoftBank said cumulative gains on its OpenAI investment totalled $45 billion.
That gives bulls something more solid than narrative: a profit base, however mark-to-market driven, that shows Son’s most aggressive AI wager is already changing the group’s numbers.
There is also support from credit markets.
CreditSights, a Fitch Ratings unit, recently maintained an “outperform” recommendation on SoftBank debt, saying the company’s underlying asset value remained strong even as its balance sheet became more stretched.
That does not remove the funding risk, but it gives the bull case a second leg: SoftBank’s assets may still be strong enough to absorb Son’s appetite for scale.
Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Kirk Boodry and Chris Muckensturm have said potential listings of OpenAI and SB Energy could help reduce SoftBank’s high-20% discount to net asset value, ease its capital burden and free up room for fresh investments.
Why aren’t the skeptics buying it?
The skeptical case starts with an old SoftBank problem: holding-company discounts rarely disappear just because the assets are exciting.
Vey-Sern Ling of UBP has warned that NAV and sum-of-the-parts valuations usually deserve a meaningful discount because shareholders in the parent rarely receive the full value of the underlying assets.
That is especially relevant for SoftBank, where leverage, asset-backed financing and private valuations all complicate the clean headline number.
TD Cowen’s Krish Sankar offers another caution sign. He lifted his SoftBank ADR price target to $20 from $13, but kept a Hold rating.
That is the market debate in miniature: even analysts raising numbers are not necessarily telling investors to chase the stock.
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