A new investment from the Japanese conglomerate would be separate from the $100 billion tied to a project announced at the White House last week.

The Japanese corporation SoftBank Group has shown interest in investing as much as $25 billion in OpenAI, which would make it the organization’s biggest financial sponsor. According to a Bloomberg report,

Japan’s SoftBank is in talks to invest $15-25 billion in OpenAI in a deal that would make it the ChatGPT-maker’s biggest financial backer, the Financial Times reported on Thursday. The report comes after Chinese startup DeepSeek sparked panic this week with a powerful new chatbot developed at a fraction of the cost of its US competitors,