SoftBank closes final $10B OpenAI tranche, stake near 13%
SoftBank Group said it executed the third and final $10 billion tranche of its follow-on OpenAI investment on 1 October (Japan time) via SoftBank Vision Fund 2, completing the $30 billion program announced in February. Cumulative OpenAI exposure is now $64.6 billion for roughly 13% ownership. The tranche was funded with proceeds from the late-September foreign-currency senior notes; SoftBank also canceled the remaining $10 billion of undrawn capacity on its OpenAI-related bridge facility. Completing the stack on schedule locks in SoftBank as OpenAI’s largest outside shareholder just as frontier labs keep leaning on debt and vendor financing to fund compute.
What else matters
Broadcom may lend Anthropic up to $42bn against TPU leases
Reuters reporting via The Next Web says Anthropic’s IPO prospectus outlines a Broadcom facility of up to $42 billion in convertible notes toward a five-year, $125.2 billion TPU lease. Supplier-as-lender echoes Nvidia’s chip-financing playbook; Anthropic flags conflicts if Broadcom sets both price and credit terms.
Google’s Project Suncatcher puts TPUs on an orbital test flight
Google describes a Planet-built prototype carrying four TPUs headed to orbit on a SpaceX rideshare to stress-test radiation, vibration, and vacuum cooling (NPR). Two more satellites are planned next year for laser-link trials — still a moonshot, not a CapEx substitute.
TypeSafe ships Jev, a decision-only model for software automation
TypeSafe released Jev, covered by InfoQ: no free-text generation, just typed answers with calibrated probabilities for code to act on. Early-access input is about $0.042 per million tokens; pin versions — the jaggedness docs warn on arithmetic and noisy state.
Worth your time
SoftBank’s third-tranche press release is the cleanest primary on how the OpenAI stack was funded and how the bridge facility was retired.
