Topline
Nvidia shares slumped as trading opened Tuesday, after SoftBank announced it had sold its entire stake in the chipmaker to fund its investments in OpenAI, marking the Japanese conglomerate’s latest move to cash out of Nvidia.
The Japanese investment firm previously cashed out of the chipmaker in 2019.
Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved
Key Facts
Nvidia shares dipped more than 2% to around $194.60 in early trading Tuesday, after the stock jumped 5.7% the previous trading session.
SoftBank stated in its earnings report that it sold 32.1 million Nvidia shares in October for $5.83 billion, separately disclosing it had sold 40.2 million T-Mobile shares.
Softbank’s chief financial officer Yoshimitsu Goto, when asked about selling Nvidia shares, noted SoftBank’s OpenAI investment is “large,” adding an “even more than $30 billion investment” would be made, and “for that, we do need to divest our existing portfolio so that that can be utilized for our financing.”
Surprising Fact
SoftBank first built a roughly $4 billion stake in Nvidia in 2017 before announcing in 2019 it would sell its equity, marking a $3.3 billion return on investment at the time. SoftBank founder and CEO Masayoshi Son said last year he regretted exiting the investment in Nvidia, which would have earned SoftBank more than $150 billion, noting, “The fish that got away was big.” Son said that, after SoftBank acquired chip designer Arm in 2016, he proposed acquiring Nvidia in a conversation with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at Huang’s home in California. The deal didn’t work out, Son said.